After the Reformation Appendix: Exsurge Domine

As the 500th All Souls' Eve since the outbreak of the Reformation approaches, it is worth remembering Leo X's bull Exsurge Domine, which offered Luther the opportunity to recant his positions in Rome after listing numerous condemned propositions of his. Beyond the pale of the pastoral opening to the document, the pope's concern for "pious ears", and the generally practical nature of the bull (the mendicant order priors who served as ghost writers went about it the right way), what is most stunning are the statements of Luther, extracted from his tracts, sermons, and pamphlets, that actually required condemnation. One reads them and wonders if Luther's scruples resulted from an inner psychosis that required the world to be logically consistent with his own talents and short-comings. Perhaps in modern psychology Luther would fall somewhere on the Autism spectrum; in this regard he is not unlike the assiduous and scrupulous St. Teresa of Avila, whose life ended in a remarkably different fashion.

Among the ideas Leo condemned are:

•  It is a heretical opinion, but a common one, that the sacraments of the New Law give pardoning grace to those who do not set up an obstacle.
• By no means may you presume to confess venial sins, nor even all mortal sins, because it is impossible that you know all mortal sins. Hence in the primitive Church only manifest mortal sins were confessed.
• No one ought to answer a priest that he is contrite, nor should the priest inquire.
• Indulgences are necessary only for public crimes, and are properly conceded only to the harsh and impatient.
• Excommunications are only external penalties and they do not deprive man of the common spiritual prayers of the Church.
• Christians must be taught to cherish excommunications rather than to fear them.
• If the pope with a great part of the Church thought so and so, he would not err; still it is not a sin or heresy to think the contrary, especially in a matter not necessary for salvation, until one alternative is condemned and another approved by a general Council.
• In every good work the just man sins.
•  A good work done very well is a venial sin.
• To go to war against the Turks is to resist God who punishes our iniquities through them.
• No one is certain that he is not always sinning mortally, because of the most hidden vice of pride.
• Free will after sin is a matter of title only; and as long as one does what is in him, one sins mortally.
• The souls in purgatory are not sure of their salvation, at least not all; nor is it proved by any arguments or by the Scriptures that they are beyond the state of meriting or of increasing in charity.
• The souls in purgatory sin without intermission, as long as they seek rest and abhor punishment.
• The souls freed from purgatory by the suffrages of the living are less happy than if they had made satisfactions by themselves.

Dissenters, at least the honest ones, will admit that what they find objectionable is rarely something they detest in a vacuum. More often than not, religious dissent, like political rebellion, is born out of restrictions existing systems put on one's manner of life. What restrictions did open contrition for sin, good deeds, resisting the Turk, and Conciliar doctrines place on Brother Martin?

After the Reformation VII: The Wrong Ecumenism

My articles in this After the Reformation series have focused on culture, politics, and social dynamics after Dr. Luther's little revolution 1517. My cowriter, J, has written more extensive on the theological impact, still lingering today, from the Reformation. But now the time has come to address, if only in a cursory manner, one of the most nefarious and lasting influences of the Reformation, the misguided "ecumenical" practices of the 20th century and the total disappearance of any real, tangible effort to reunite with the dissident Eastern Churches.

The Church routinely suffered schisms in the first seven centuries. During the pre-Nicene era, schisms would often pit two bishops against each other within a city when a theological dispute became a pretext for deeper, personal disagreements to manifest themselves. This was certain the case during St. Cyprian's time in Carthage. As the early ecumenical councils proclaimed binding statements of faith groups rejecting the conciliar anathemas severed themselves from the Church while retaining a Sacramental tie. In the age of St. Athanasius and the second wind of the Arian heresy, Arians retained any number of churches in a city while Catholics held the others. Doctrinal dispute bifurcated the loyalties of cities while true Sacraments remained within the parishes. The Sacraments, the mysterious and enduring presence of Christ enacting His grace on earth through symbols, bind the Church together as glue. If anything, the presence of valid Sacraments outside the visible Church is an act of violence against the Church in need of amelioration.

Often enough time and good judgment did heal schisms (the schism of the Lombard countries and Aquileia during the "Three Chapters" controversy and the enthronement of Photios in Constantinople while Ignatios still breathed), but not always (Eutyches' hoodwinking of the Alexandrian Church and the ensuing Uniate-ish Greek patriarchate erected in the city). While some schisms were more hardened than others due to matters of faith, no major schism effected an entirely novel way of being a Christian or severed Sacramental validity. Moreover, there was no reason to think any given schism would be permanent. Even the misnamed "East-West Schism" was met with two unionist councils, Lyon and Florence, which may have had more lasting fruit if not for the fall of Byzantium and the rebuke of the reunion in 1471 under Ottoman rule.

Within the context of fifteen centuries of schisms and occasionally resolutions among churches maintaining Sacramental unity and ties to Apostolic origins, the statement of Lumen Gentium "the Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church" would seem a friendly if all too eager statement. In reality, it was an act of outreach to religious patterns with shared none of the aforementioned characteristics of traditional Christianity which held attached separated groups, at one level or another, to the Catholic whole. The premise of this statement is hopelessly caught up in the ignorance befitting a 1959 sociology seminar at a German university, with atheism on the rise and Roman Catholicism along with Reformation-era protestantism presumed to be the two forms of Christianity. However, 20th century Roman Catholicism does not even reflect the entire Latin Catholic tradition, much less all traditional forms of Christianity.

In short, the Reformation created a new way to be a Christian in common society displaced from the differences of singular doctrines which split parishes and episcopates a millennium earlier. In the years following 1517 established Christian institutions negotiated the new paradigm with great difficulty. The cathedrals and Strasbourg and Cologne had both Catholic and heretic canons for a time with the former even being assigned heretical services for a century by the city council. University faculties, particularly in Germanic countries, were similarly split. It was in this context that concepts of religious plurality, association betwitx Church and State, and ecclesiology developed after the Tridentine Council all the way up to Vatican II and Lumen Gentium. Since the Rhine flowed into the Tiber during the 1960s, and does again during the Bergolgian years, one can only interpret Lumen Gentium and the ensuing movement of derranged ecumenism through the narrow duality of Latin Catholicism and Protestantism. Ecumenists content themselves to invite Orthodox Christians to their silly events, provided they bring their funny hats, and dicastries in Rome will praise the Eastern Catholics Churches for being the other "lung", but any serious observer of Church history sees these moments as what they are: ignorant tourists pointing out things in a menagerie.

As protestantism becomes less relevant and more fissiparous, we would do well to rediscover the historic outreach to our "separated brethren" who are indeed alienated children of the same spiritual fathers as our ancestors did with the Eastern Churches before the Reformation. Perhaps then we can credibly pray for "peace throughout the whole world, the welfare of the holy Churches of God, and the union of them all."

After the Reformation V: Barren Society, Revolutionary Government & the Lonely Individiual

A month ago President Trump went to Paris to commemorate Bastille Day with the toy-boy president of the French Republic. The respective republican governments both boast three item founding slogans; one is “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”; the other is “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” While the America motto represents an early form of Western individualism, the French doggerel reflects the end result of decades of proto-collectivism developed in the salons and parlor rooms of intellectuals who could not fathom being denied power. And still, these seemingly disparate traditions share one common term that binds their place in the Western cultural legacy, Liberty.

Liberty, seemingly, implies liberation from something. The thirteen very different American colonies were liberated from taxation laws and the obligation to do business with the East India Company. The lack of universal social structures and the newness of the colonies made the break more palpable at the local level than it would have been if America had been one well established colonial organ. From what, then, did the French Revolution liberate France? Why it liberate France from every cultural and social structure that made one a Frenchman in the past thousand years.

Revolutionary and post-revolutionary France became a decade-long case study in the evolution of an individualistic society. Gone was the king, the noble patronage, trade associations, guilds, charities, parish vestries, episcopal conferences, and kind reference to any history that predated one’s birth. Nature abhors a vacuum and people abhor nullity. Rather than exist as intersections of various associations of society, Frenchmen now found themselves equality at the bottom of a new, two-tiered social system topped by the National Assembly. The Assembly precociously judged the orthodoxy and patriotism of every new and existing organization, giving them permission to exist according to its own adjudications. In the fullness of time Napoleon Bonaparte replaced the National Assembly as the progenitor of the French nation and hence of anything that might characterize the millions of newly individualized, lonely Frenchmen.

This has become the modern political paradigm throughout the Western world: the collective state and the lonely individual. Previous Western societies had their cliques, their rooted conflicts on matters of succession, ethnicity, and invasion of one group by another. This particular shift—often ascribed to the intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment, but in fact a social legacy of the Reformation—was nothing short of a fundamental change in the way common folk looked at their place in society in relation to their new masters, who they wrongly thought to be themselves.

The French, German, and Scottish Enlightenments took place within the context of a coherent society, if one less coherent and bound than it had been two or three centuries earlier. While the Reformation discarded the concept of Apostolic Succession and denied the potency of bishops and priests to confect the hocus pocus of Sacraments, the Reformers retained the latent authority of teachers of the faith to interpret Scripture. Indeed, all mainline Reformed denominations, aside from the uniquely created Church of England, derived from the Scriptural exegesis and eisegesis of some preacher. In theory, the existing late medieval communities continued as they were, perhaps with different Sunday rituals and different beliefs. In practice, the substitution of a broader tradition with the views of singular teachers and the discardment of religious works gradually impoverished the places where the Reformation had any influence. Customs such as feasts, processions, veneration of relics, and pilgrimages belonged too much to ideas of penance and intercession for the new religious outlook. Plays about the Nativity, the Passion, and the Dormition came from spurious sources, left too much to the imagination, and failed to lean exclusively on the explicit words of vernacular Scripture. Guilds dedicated to providing Masses for the Dead could no more be tolerated than the doctrine of Purgatory, so people’s memories died when the people themselves died. Worst of all, the practice of public almsgiving and parish charity stank of salvation by works; and so the Christian religion no longer institutionally provided for the poor and destitute within a city or village. Layers of order peeled way as the Reformers lessened the define doctrines that could be justified with Scripture; practices, too, fell by the wayside. Preachers reduced the barriers between themselves and the faithful, and so also reduced the barriers between the faithful and the preachers’ teachings. It all vaguely resembles Jean Jacques Rousseau’s conviction that if not for the albatross of institutional society, all men left freely to their own dispositions would agree with Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Sixteen century religious savages were no more able to create a consensus opinion or govern themselves than were Rousseau’s eighteenth century savages. Permissibility for any idea or act of religion fell upon the judgment of the Reform party leader just as it fell upon the National Assembly two centuries later. The General Will of religion and state incarnate is nobly savage bureaucracy.

Today our elected governments and religious authorities exercise far more power over our actions and ideas than any Renaissance pope or Bourbon king ever did. Yet we can satisfy ourselves that they are of our own choosing and that they reflect a general consensus of equally able individuals. The consequence of the Reformation is not a liberated society, but rather one with fewer social safeguards and a much larger ruling class. The barren society left behind by the Reformation could be paraphrased by Robert Bolt’s invented defense of law by Saint Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons. Could it not?

After the Reformation IV: Pauline Theology

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One thing you learn when growing up Protestant is that you cannot understand the words of Jesus except as explained by St. Paul. The dominican words of the Gospels are too vague and symbolic, too emotional and hyperbolic, to ever be understood in their plain sense. Christ's admonition to perform good works and the threat of damnation leveled at the justified are simply too complex to be taken at face value. What the average Christian needs is an interpreter who is also speaking divine words: enter Paul the Apostle. Jesus, with whom the Christian supposedly has a personal relationship, takes a back seat to Paul, with whom he is not allowed to have active friendship.

Supposedly one need only look at some of the crazy things Christ said—plucking out eyes and spinning yarns—to see that he was speaking simply and to simple people. For robust theology, one apparently must look elsewhere, and St. Paul's epistles are easy pickins for the would-be reformer.

Not, of course, that any contradiction can actually be found between the words of Christ and the inspired writings of St. Paul, but in many ways his words are easier to twist than Our Lord's. In his writings "are certain things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, to their own destruction" (II Pet. 3).

These terrible warnings remained unheeded by Fr. Martin Luther, who was so bold as to flagrantly correct St. Paul's epistle to the Roman Church. The Apostle's theology of grace, justification, predestination, and law are highly complex. Because of the density of his writings, the average layman is relieved to rely on a commentary rather than slogging through the epistolatory swamp on his own. If the commentator appears erudite but still writes at a low level, he is almost certain to succeed in convincing many.

When Protestantism began to disintegrate into liberal movements, its overemphasis on St. Paul remained. These new perfidious theologians accused the Apostle to the Gentiles of inventing Christianity and of twisting the true teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. This was nothing more than the flip side of the longstanding reliance on Paul—an inevitable exploitation of an interior imbalance. There has been some pushback among conservative Protestant scholars with a so-called New Perspective on Paul, but most consider this an unwanted compromise.

Throw a rock into a crowd of Protestant theologians, and you are unlikely to find one that specializes in anything but Pauline theology. Sometimes they possess a passing familiarity with the other books of Holy Writ, but much in the way one might remember the required reading of his youth (Homer and Virgil in a better age, Steinbeck and Salinger in ours), not in the way of an expert or a careful reader. They cannot easily abstract their heresies from the Gospels, and must of necessity find easier targets.

Like many of the theologian-saints who have graced the Church of God throughout the centuries, St. Paul has not been free from the indignity of misuse and exaggerated importance. He had a much more humble opinion of his own person and abilities, and a higher opinion of his office, than most of his commentators have bestowed upon him.

It is unseemly to cast aspersions upon any part of Holy Scriptures, but one does wonder if Protestants will ever be cured of their Pauline madness if they do not put down the Collected Letters of St. Paul and read just about anything else in its place. Their theological tunnel vision has been corrupting Catholic schools for far too long, and if only for our sake it needs to come to an end.

After the Reformation III: The Incomplete Christian

The battles for orthodoxy have left many losers throughout the centuries. With the wealth of divine revelation that came from the Incarnate God through his Apostles, misunderstandings and intentional perversions abounded almost immediately in the infant Church. Simon Peter's paternal mission of protecting the treasure of revelation was opposed by Simon Magus, the father of Gnosticism and—according to many Church Fathers—all heresies. Since the expulsion of Simon from the Church, ecclesiastical history has seen similar treatment given to the Arians, Montanists, Pelagians, Docetists, iconoclasts, Albigensians, Lutherans, and many more. The errors that degrade and deform the true Faith are necessarily anathematized and cast into the outer darkness.

Some of these heresies lingered for centuries after their explicit condemnation. Arianism was anathematized in AD 381, but St. Boethius was sentenced to death by an Arian king in 524, and it survived in organized form until at least the 7th century in North Africa. There's an old joke that goes like this:

Two men considering a religious vocation were having a conversation. The first asked, "How can we compare the Jesuits and Dominicans?"

The second replied, "Well, they were both founded by Spaniards — St. Dominic for the Dominicans, and St. Ignatius of Loyola for the Jesuits. They were also both founded to combat heresy — the Dominicans to fight the Albigensians, and the Jesuits to fight the Protestants." 

"Then what's different between the Jesuits and Dominicans?" 

"Met any Albigensians lately?"

But that isn't entirely fair. While the Lutheran heresy has lingered for five hundred years, it has done so by way of constant mutation, and it is hardly unique in its longevity. By the time the Church condemned Protestant errors at Trent, men of notable intelligence had already been getting creative with Luther's theology and making it their own, and papal respect had been so greatly diminished among the populace that few cared any longer what the bishop of distant Rome had to say.

The Counter-Reformation fought back with a renewed sense of Thomism, but Protestants were so successful everywhere they went that the Church had to take a defensive approach in places where the Catholic Faith had once reigned uncontested. A siege mentality may be necessary from time to time, but it is not conducive to social health. A city under blockade will not survive for long without suffering from famine and plague, even if it is not ultimately conquered. Likewise, the Church suffered for centuries under a war of attrition by Luther and his armies, and the wide open fields of Christendom were traded for bunkers and priest holes. P. John XXIII's admonition to "throw open the windows of the Church" was not a sign that the enemies of God had stopped lobbing mustard gas our way, but that he was tired of smelling his fellow bishops' funk.

Since then we have engaged in an uneasy truce with the mutant grandchildren of Luther and his fish-barrel wife. The alternative to closed-door, manualistic gas was the recognition of our former enemies as fellow men of faith. The condemnations of Trent died the death of a thousand qualifications, and only positive acclamations of Protestant doctrine and practice were permitted to be voiced. The mere practice of baptism was enough for the Council Fathers to declare them as "separated brethren": "For men who believe in Christ and have been truly baptized are in communion with the Catholic Church even though this communion is imperfect"—surely this was a surprise to the millions of Evangelicals who still considered the papacy to be something akin to the Whore of Babylon!

So now we have Christians who are in "imperfect" communion with the Church of God (e.g., Lutherans and Presbyterians), and those who are in "perfect" communion (e.g., Cdls. Kasper and Mahoney). Catholic clerics endlessly praise the love Protestants have for the Holy Writ, and their desire for a "personal relationship" with Jesus. The Protestant is idealized and made an exemplar of Catholic piety, even though his spiritual life is often composed of a series of existential crises rather than solid faith and hope.

Some Catholic converts from Protestant sects refuse to even call themselves converts, preferring rather to express their move as a growth into the fullness of Christian reality. No longer is Luther a heretic to be condemned, but a misunderstood German theologian—aren't they all?—who only wanted the best for the Church. The traditional anathema was necessary for the mental health of Catholics cleric and lay, for it allowed them to see reality as it actually was. Now we are forced at gunpoint to see only the good in the enemies of the Church, and so we have descended gradually but inevitably into actual madness.

The Protestant milieu is not "mere Christianity" as C.S. Lewis would have it, nor is Catholicism simply "more Christianity" as Fr. Dwight contends. Catholicism is Christianity, and Protestantism is something else; that the latter happens to contain elements of Christianity is ultimately immaterial. We would never call Arianism an "incomplete Christianity" because Fr. Arius happened to say many true things in between his lies.

Heretics are men who have made shipwreck of their faith, and they visit their sin upon their third and fourth generations by denying them the means of salvation. If they are mindful enough to baptize their sons, even these deny themselves salvation as soon as they are old and knowledgable enough to repudiate the Catholic Faith. (In some Protestant circles this is practically a rite of passage.) Since more and more Protestants no longer even baptize in an acceptable manner, the single Sacrament they could once boast is slipping from their grasp. They stand naked and trembling before the gaze of Heaven. It is a terrible thing to possess knowledge of Christ and salvation, but to lack the means to attain it.

"The devils also believe—and tremble."

After the Reformation II: The Mutable Heresy

I have been thinking of how I can contribute to the "After the Reformation" series begun by His Traddiness. One might think that I, having been raised an Evangelical Protestant, would have much to say on the cultural effects of the Reformation, but I already said quite a bit about the paucity of Evangelical culture in a post from last year:

They have no lasting poetry, no sculpture, no memorable novels, no architecture, no music that isn’t a cheap imitation or childish emoting. When an Evangelical wishes to learn how to integrate faith and the arts, he inevitably falls back on Catholic examples, and then spends hours explaining to his friends why reading Flannery O’Connor doesn’t necessarily make one a dirty papist.

Consider the American Calvinist. Occasionally this individual will be a member of a mainstream denomination like the Presbyterians, but most often the Calvinist is to be found in a small, roaming pack of co-religionists. Rather than living within the tradition of the great iconoclast John Knox, they make historical reference solely to the 17th-century Synod of Dort by way of its oversimplification in the 20th-century floral mnemonic TULIP. Sometimes they can quote Calvin himself, but only as already quoted by a Calvinist preacher. Their taste in clothing, facial hair, and alcohol have more in common with urban hipsters than with their Reformed forebears. As likely as not, they belong to no denomination, but only to some "local church."

The case is even worse with the more generic Evangelical Christian. There is no unifying principle, even for a single community—no history, no hymnody, no common creed beyond a bland belief in the Trinity and the authority of the Scriptures. Ministers are often burdened with attendees who are not even certain they believe in God because they are so angry with their Creator. (Horrifyingly, our Catholic parishes resemble the Evangelical milieu more and more every year.)

Protestantism is a persistent heresy in part because it is so good at adaptation. The first few generations of this movement reinvented themselves to appeal to the needs of the time. Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Melanchthon, and all the rest were vastly different personalities with vastly differing theologies, all flying more or less under the banner of the five Solas for the appearance of unanimity. Luther was a crypto-Manichean, but Melanchthon retroactively wrote him as an Augustine revivalist. King Henry exploited Protestantism for his own gains, caring little for theology.

As time went on, even the Solas fell out of favor, until Sola Scriptura was the last one standing. And then, liberal Protestants ate away even at the authority of the Holy Writ with its endless stream of German Panzer exegetes. Fewer and fewer Protestants, even self-professed conservatives, can be found today who unironically profess the authority of Scripture.

Luther exploited the exhaustion of the laity who were sickened by simony and clerical lechery. Calvin exploited the rising humanistic trends of linguistics and the dismissal of gradually developed tradition. Knox exploited the political chaos in Britain to loot the churches of Scotland. The so-called Great Awakenings were movements that exploited resentments and pushed for social justice, birthing denominations like an endless series of bastard children. Historical-Critical scholarship exploited the rise of skepticism and anti-religious sentiment. Charismatic groups exploited the dryness that came from an excess of loveless doctrine. Televangelists exploited the lonely and desperate who had no friends outside of their television sets.

Doctrinally, Protestantism might as well be renamed Proteanism in its perversion of the Pauline desire to become "all things to all men." The heresies concerning justification and the sacraments were condemned at Trent, but most spiritual descendants of the Reformation today could not even explain what they believe about those things. They attend church services to hear a nice sermon that may or may not be about Jesus, and sometimes hope to be convicted by "the Spirit" to change their lives for the better, but they don't care to know much about the nature and character of God. They come for the community and the small discussion groups, sometimes for the marriage counseling. When they stop feeling "fed," they move on to what seems like greener pastures at a new church.

For all its faults, the Counter-Reformation insisted on retaining a recognizable Catholic identity in the Roman Rite (liturgically, theologically, and artistically), and this monolithic homogenization was a draw to those exhausted by the shifting waves of Protestantland. Eventually, Protestantism found a way to exploit even the Catholic Church, adjusting itself like a parasite to a new host, and now the Church finds herself desperate to adapt to every perceived need of modern man, no matter how little modern man cares for her attention.

The Church has raised up many opponents to the Protestant mutagen, but they are all as different as their target chose to become: Erasmus, Robert Bellarmine, the Society of Jesus, Francis de Sales, and so on. There is an argument to be made that Protestantism is just a continuation of the old Manichean heresy that itself traces back to the Gnostics of Apostolic times. So perhaps there is no true end of the perennial heresy until the end of the world. Even if the last traces of Luther and Calvin are eradicated from the earth, some mutated strain would live on in the hearts of men. The best we can do is prevent infection and hold true, even when many in the Church recommend succumbing to its sway.

Prayer card for the martyrs of Douai College.

After the Reformation I: "My Words Will Never Pass Away"

Some weeks ago I was meandering through a bookshop, trying to kill excess time before a distant appointment, when I happened upon a special edition of Life magazine called Blessed Art Thou Amongst Women. Pompeo Batoni’s Virgin of the Annunciation graced the cover of this well illustrated little volume on the Blessed Mother. A Catholic, Robert Sullivan, wrote the long essay inside, an essay which aspires toward a broad perspective on Mary that befits modern journalism, an overview on what she means to people rather than who she is. One particular line caught my view while thumbing through the line; I cannot recall the phrase precisely, but it effectively surmised that the reactionary Reformers of the 16^th century preferred the narrowly known Mary of the Bible over the experientially known Mary of medieval Catholic devotions and miracles. And with this the influence of the Reformers’ sola scriptura doctrine crystalizes in modern times.

The Reformation broke out at the end of the Middle Ages, an epoch characterized by an extroverted, almost militant piety which asserted that Christ, the Saints, and holy things had a normal, continual presence in the world and which, by the faithful’s cooperation with them in a penitential spirit, the Church could obtain favor from heaven and the remission of sins. Or say contemporary textbooks. Factually, all of this is true, if amiss in characterizing the spirit of the Middle Ages, the apex of the Latin liturgy, monasticism, pilgrimage, papal power, and also administrative corruption. Many of the virtues of the medieval period—penance, Mass, pilgrimage—became occasions of vice for ambitious Italian and Spanish families in the form of ready-paid indulgences, fraudulent Mass stipends for aliturgical “dry” and votive Masses, and military actions dissimulated as holy war. It was in this time, at the close of the medieval period, that Luther left the loo to make his objections.

In the same bookshop I sauntered over to the religion section and found myself thumbing through one of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s books on the Reformation. He resolutely denies that Renaissance decadence was the condition sine qua non for the Reformation, instead insisting that the Reformers, especially Calvin, were returning to the orthodoxy of Chalcedon—which is convenient, because a few councils later the Church declared the absolute orthodoxy of venerating holy images. This is rubbish. All reform movements are inherently reactionary, at least in cause; they handicap themselves the more they hew to their reactionary stimuli rather than the challenges of the day. But also, reform movements look at the current state, compare it to the past, and find the need to purify the current day to make it like unto the past. This is fine within living memory, but Reformation idealized an age fourteen centuries passed.

In reaction to the excesses of medieval piety and the sums the Borgias and their imitators profited, the Reformers sought consolation in the Scriptures and their friendly confines, where Mary says very little, the Apostles even less, sins are pardoned without the aid of manuals for penance, and there is no Roman Canon. The Reformers arrived at sola scriptura, paradoxically accompanied by two or four other solae, depending on one’s numbering. Within these Scriptures, they taught, all Truth resides for the profit, belief, and salvation of the believer. The reduction of the Truth to what was recounted in a book may seem narrower and purer to modern academics skeptical of medieval piety, but at the time it must have carried an elitist association on par with owning a Rolls-Royce in modern times.

A Rolls-Royce and a Gutenberg-era book have much in common: new both cost as much as the average person made in several years, both took quite a while to produce, both were decorated with the finest materials, and both required something special to wield (in modern times a chauffeur and in older times literacy). One might retort that the non-nobles and non-clergy who possessed academic and functional literacy could read the Scriptures at the local cathedral library, but then again one can rent a Roller for one’s special occasions.

The diffusion of literacy and cheapness of printing after Gutenberg’s press made its way to factories made the Scriptures more accessible to people, who would now understand the Bible in a different way than people had in the old religion. A Catholic would readily admit the profitability of reading the Scriptures, that they are written under Divine inspiration and contain no error of doctrine, and that they are integral to the faithful’s religion; why else would the Church read them at the Office and Eucharist? Where the Church comes full stop is in asserting that the Scriptures are sufficient for all truth and belief. For example, what if someone wants to better their Christian virtue? They can and should read the Gospels to meditate on the miracles and teachings of Christ; they can take some inspiration from the Acts of the Apostles, but little more; the rest of the New Testament has exhortations to virtue proper to the problems of the day, which can often apply to us, but they were not absolutely written for our specific challenges. Saint Luke is aware that he is writing Scripture, Paul is not. Without the examples of the post-Apostolic saints and the various kinds of devotion (pilgrimages, types of penance, parish customs and charities) that emerged over time, one is left with the need to personalize the contents of Scripture to one’s own life rather than take the Evangelists’ plain words as they are meant to be heard.

While popular piety was time-travelling into the Apostolic and Old Testament age, like characters from the ‘80s B film Time Bandits, the scholar class born of the same Renaissance Europe began to take a very different approach to the Scriptures. A renewed interest in Greek language and culture followed the appeal of Emperor John to the western bishops at Venice and the exile of Byzantine scholars and clergy (most famously Bessarion) to Italy after the fall of Constantinople. These men read the New Testament in the Greek original in between Aristotle and Homer. A revival in Greek scholarship enabled various vernacular translations without using the Vulgate as an intermediary; mostly famously, the King James edition came from this movement. By the 18^th century the scholarly class had taken a view of the Scriptures quite contrary to what the translators of prior times had. Years of guessing at the better use of words here or there and the study of language patterns gave rise to the notion that the Scriptures were written over a century after their purported events and that their texts constitute several editions of various corruptions, emendations, and made up nonsense that can best be characterized as a wishful piety. At worst, there is Voltaire’s entry for “Eucharist” in his thoroughly blasphemous Dictionnaire philosophique.

By the 19^th century a cottage industry of linguists dedicated to the study of religious texts had emerged in Germany. They studied the Koran, the Old Testament, and the New, only to find all three wanting. The Koran was written off as the result of tribal superstition written down in a developing language with poor structure; the Old Testament did not fare much better; consensus arose that the New Testament probably derived from some fellow known to us today as the “Historical Jesus”, and that the Christ described in the Prologue of Saint John’s Gospel came about some time later. The Church resisted this secular take on the Scriptures—the New Testament assertions of which have fallen out of favor in recent decades—until the 20^th century, when the German outlook coincided with the ecumenical movement. Was there not a book called The Rhine Flows into the Tiber?

At last we return to where we began, at the Barnes & Noble at 75 and Northwest Freeway in Dallas, reading snippets of Life magazine’s edition on the Blessed Virgin. The post-Christian world agrees with both the pietist and the scholarly aspects of the Reformed Biblical perspective. Christianity was simpler, purer, and without unnecessary extras during the era of the New Testament, when people heard the words of Jesus and kept them without candles before icons, vestments, popes, or works. It also finds that static, real-only-for-a-few-years-and-irrelevant-to-us-now version of events hopelessly impossible to justify according to the historical record and linguistic analysis. We end with a Mary bereft of the Rosary, intercession, and the title “Mother of God”, being left with a Mary who is only known through a few passages of Sacred Scripture and whose role in those texts is best glossed over; at best they might detract from focus on Christ and at worst the Magnificat itself is a later interpolation.

Our Lord said, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, my words shall not pass” (Matthew 24:35). They have not, but the doctrine of sola scriptura gave its best effort yet.

New Series: After the Reformation

Centennial anniversaries are all the rage in Western Catholic blogs this year, all of them foreboding anniversaries, too. Five centuries ago an Augustian monk with scruples and hemorrhoids entered into a dispute with Leo X. Three centuries ago some Franco-British cleric founded a lodge for like-minded, enlightened people. And one hundred years ago the Virgin Mary appeared to three children in a field in Portugal. It is the first of these anniversaries that elicited the other two, and it is this event which deserves some greater study.

The outward effects of the Reformation are well known. Swiss and German Catholicism devolved into fissiparous sects led by men who assumed the teaching authority of bishops, but who rejected the Sacramental authority there of. Henry VIII split from the Church for his divorce and Catholics became "the other" in England. Swedish and Norwegian Christianity took its own odd turn. The Reformation broke the Church's final authority in temporal matters and ushered in a new era of nationalism, colonialism, individualism, and, the first stage of political cancer, democracy.

But what of the lesser known influences of the Reformation? We have noted Geoffrey Hull's observation that the Reformation replaced Christian Europe with a series of European nations, the majority of which had Christian populations. Robert Nisbet drew attention to the replacement of "intermediary" institutions like the Church and guild with the absolute state and the lonely Christian believer. Much of this blog's early work compared protestant pietism with the Counter-Reformation liturgy and devotional life. Yet, there are other influences from the Reformation, and we hope to explore them throughout the rest of this year, namely: book printing, the objectification of Scripture, art and music, philosophy, and nationalistic politics. Stay tuned. It should be quite a year....

He couldn't have been talking about German music....