Disclosure:
The author of this article is an Orthodox Jew. None of the contents of this article or any other in this or any other series is intended to affirm the veracity of any religious principle held by any other faith than his own.
Likewise, it is not a task he considers appropriate or fitting for him to pass judgment on the fidelity of any stream of Christianity to the original teachings of Jesus and / or his disciples.
The goal of this article is to achieve greater understanding of historical processes by which the modern Conservative Ideology had emerged. It should not be taken as a religious instruction.
![Moritz Oppenheim - Die Trauung [The Wedding], 1861 (detail of the full painting)](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/c9133b_cb62a86463984dd69765b53f8dad9cb1~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_125,h_109,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/c9133b_cb62a86463984dd69765b53f8dad9cb1~mv2.jpg)
Introduction: Two Faiths in Europe
At the beginning of the period in which the Crown of Europe had started to exert direct control over the territories hitherto attached to them by personal feudal relationships, there were two religions which had dominated the souls of their subjects: Roman Catholicism and Judaism.
The Catholic World and its Foundations:
The former, who has been the younger of the two and the strongest division of a sect that separated itself from it in the 1st Century, enjoyed every advantage.
Ever since the days of the Late Roman Empire, it has been the religion of the State; by the time of its fall in the West, of the majority. It was highly organized in an efficient and elaborate hierarchy. Local parishes were assembled under the authority of an επισκοποσ, or, as the term came to the English, a bishop and to the French, évêque.
The word means nothing more than overseer in Greek and it is a testament to the organic origin of the Church- small groups of believers, gathered under the auspices of an elder or the occasional priest in the hidden places of the Pagan world, where some learned and pious man would visit from time to time to ensure their coherence with the widely accepted doctrine and coherence with other believers.
Now, the bishops, and their superiors the archbishops were sedentary officers and powerful lords, organizing vast, well defined and rich territories. We should not look at these great principalities of faith with envy or derision- they were all established and maintained by the blood and at the risk of their holders, and, with all cynicism aside, were concerned with providing the entire (Christian) populace with necessary and highly desired services.
Christianity is, at its heart, a faith built on a number of spiritual needs- for relief from guilt, for the presence of the Divine, the personal connection ro God and for the promise of eternal life.
The Church had supplied all three, and, more importantly, supplied them to all. Indeed the Church was the only institution in Christian Europe which had any concern whatsoever with any aspect the well-being of the peasantry- the vast majority of the People.
The local secular priest (that is, a priest living amongst his flock and outside monastic orders) would listen to his parishioner's confessions, instruct them to mend their lives and tell them they are forgiven; he would bless the newborn, the newly-wedded, and the dying, inducting the humblest peasant into the Kingdom of Heaven. He would bless fields, ploughs, furnaces and all other useful tools and items. Most importantly, he would celebrate the mass, the Lord's Supper, the Holy Communion- in which the Divine Himself would be said to come into the material host which the believers consumed, becoming one with Christ and the Church. He would confort them, tell them of the motherly love of Mary and the mercy of Christ, he would assure them that a loving Lord is overseeing human affairs, as small as they may seem.
With all the darkness and misery of the long centuries of the premodern world, the Catholic church endowed the life of common Christian with dignity, meaning and otherworldly beauty. One may be a serf or an emperor, it was all the same- they were all equal in Christ.
What did the priest, so often maligned by modern authors as an exploiter, a parasite and a lay-about get in return?
Not much. His Rectory house, which he didn't own, was often not much better than that of a well-to-do peasant.
He lived off a meager allowance which was chipped of the tithes he collected and mostly passed up to his superiors. Around the 12th Century, he lost his ability to marry and have a family. He often had to seek marginal income by singing extraordinary masses for some of his better-off parishioners. The local lord would laugh at the idea that the poor, sack-clothed, pate-shaven celibate man living on his land and dragging his feet to and fro from one unpleasant task to another dominates him.
The material fare of a monk in orders was of course even less pleasant.
Some religious orders went so far as to ban laughter. Others demanded silence. The least severe dictated that friars and nuns vow poverty, celibacy, and obedience. All demanded that a religious life consist of no more than ora et labora - prayer and work.
The greatest overseer in Europe was the Patriarch-Bishop of Rome.
Originally, he was a member of a five-men panel, each overseeing one the great Christian cities of the Roman world. This pentarchy, in which he always claimed a senior position (as the officer responsible for the greatest city in the Empire and the one, being the seat of Imperial power, which was most vulnerable to the wrath of the pagan emperors), had all its four Eastern Sees fall away from contact with him. First, The Patriarch of Constantinople (which was the only one created by the Emperor as opposed to growing organically from the community of believers) disputed with him over this seniority. Then the Sees of Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria either fell into Christological disputes, becoming in essence the focal points of separate religious bodies. Then they fell under the shadow of the Islamic Caliphate, which made communication and coordination difficult. Finally, the East was officially alienated from the Western Church, through a series of bitter disputes and accumulated mutual bitterness.
The objective of the Papacy, as the court of the supreme western prelate came to be known, was to free itself from the undue influence of temporal interests.
The Franks were called in to free the Papacy from the triple yoke of the Byzantine Exarchate of Ravenna, the great Patrician families of Rome and the Kingdom of the Lombards. Finally their king was declared Holy Roman Emperor and officially tasked with defending the Pope from any and all such threats. The Pope then spent the next five centuries freeing himself from the influence of the Emperors, which did not shy from setting up antipopes, threatening the city of Rome and even forcing it out of the city.
By the beginning of the period which we have started examining, when kings started to assert direct state-control over territories hitherto tied to them merely by personal allegiance of their lords, the Papal disputes were over. The Pope has been firmly established as a unique and supreme authority over the spiritual life of all Christians between the Vistula and Connaught. Popes excommunicated and re-communicated kings. They determined the validity of their marriages. They appointed bishops and archbishops controlling vast estates in various realms. They determined the doctrine for millions. They claimed the authority to depose kings, which was rarely exercised, but was always kept in the background. Some kings even went so far, as did King John of England, and swear fealty as vassals to the Pope in Rome. Peter's pence, which started its way in the Saxon era as pious contribution, had become a tax. Indeed England was the one country in Europe who was consistent in its unquestioning support of Rome, but now all of Christendom was enjoined with it.
In other words, while the State was raising a new Nobility of Service from the remnants of the old Feudal aristocracy and the upper echelons of the gentry and the Burgesses, the clerical order, which for centuries served kings as the only available pools of skilled bureaucrats was declaring its refusal to be a tool of the State and reasserting its superiority to the temporal power of the State.
The Life of the Jews in Europe
Medieval Jews were everywhere west of the Jewish Homeland, descendants of Roman subjects.
They came to these lands before the destruction of the 2nd Temple in the Great Revolt - but each Jewish Revolt against Roman rule brought with it another wave of Jewish captives which were ransomed or sold throughout the Empire, and further prosecution which led to Jews heading for the marginal provinces, away from the center of Imperial power and attention. There have been Jews in Roman Gaul since the 1st Century. There is some reason to suspect a Christian martyred in 304 in Britain was a Jew. The Roman lands in the Rhinelands are known to have organized Jewish communities since 321 at the latest (some of these cities had their Roman name preserved by the Jews, who continued to refer to the Franco-German city of Cologne / Köln in the Latin Colonia, to Worms as Vormaitia / Vermayza and turned the ancient name of Speyer (Spira) into both a common last name and a pun (Shapira is the Aramaic for Beautiful). In Spain, Jews claimed to have been in the country since before the destruction of the First Temple, indeed the land of Tarshish, where Jonah attempted to flee from the Lord to, might have been a Phoenician colony in Spain.
Regardless, Judaism have been, everywhere outside the Jewish homeland, a minority religion.
Further, this was a religion which the Christian majority viewed through the lense of their own scripture and religious history, and therefore was misunderstood on its own terms. In the eyes of Christians, even learned and charitable ones, Jews were clinging to the the Old Law which was given unto the world of death and sin and which, by the sacrifice of Jesus, was redeemed and transformed and therefore placed under the New Law of Grace, Love and Mercy. It therefore followed, in their eyes, that Jewish life must be harsh, legalistic and unforgiving, stereotypes that evolved into popular description of Jews as harsh, legalistic and unforgiving people.
Nothing can be further from the truth.
It is true that Judaism was, and is, a religion of commandments - those commandments, 613 in number - are governed by laws, either specified in the text of the Five Books of Moses (known as the Written Torah), transmitted by tradition (The Oral Torah) or decided, according to both, by precedence arrived at after deliberation and debate, concluded by majority rule and common practice. But what did these laws entail?
The Law of Israel commands love towards one's fellow man equal to the one has towards his own person. They demanded that foreigners be provided for together with poor fellow Israelites for such are the ways of peace. It demanded men participate in rich, bountiful daily community life through the institution of public prayer. It gave the Jewish family the Sabbath not merely for religious contemplation, but for good cheer, for sacred joy, for lifting of spirits.
Jews did not have anything resembling the Christian clergy. However, this was due to the duties of such a clergy being dispersed amongst all believers- there was, and there is to this day in fact no clear line delineating rabbis from laymen.
Jewish rabbis had had a long tradition to practice their calling for free ("As I (have taught you) gratis, so shall you (teach) gratis" have been a widely accepted interpretation of Deuteronomy 4:14) - while plying another trade for their livelihood - surgery, colliery, shoemaking, smithing, needlework, wholesale and retail commerce - all these were professions taken up by rabbis since the emergence of the class in the 3rd Century BC. The start of the practice of paid rabbinate was extremely awkward and was allowed only as compensation for the time the learned man could have been using to earn his livelihood - as late as the 13th century, Moses Maimonides protested that scholars should not live off of public charity - he had no other way to describe a scholar which does not do any other work for his daily bread- and even that was based on the precedent of officers of the synagogue who were paid for their part-time management of the affairs of public affairs. Conversely, many laymen had actually received the smichah- the Rabbinical ordination, or were capable of receiving it, but refrained from practicing as rabbis either due to humility or the aforementioned burdens of the Rabbinate.
The rabbis taught - this was their main function - but they have not become the domineering elite which they are often portrayed as by modern authors. They did their work diligently and started it early - children learned their letters at three or five, usually at public expense - schooling was considered to be a public matter and a fundamental obligation of parents and community alike.
Parents took direct and profound interest in the education of their children - a man's reputation was in direct relation to his command of the Jewish sources.
Jewish boys showed they are Barei Daath - that is, that they have reached the age of reason and therefore are Barei Mitzvah - capable of being subject to the Law - by an examination in front of the community - which had evolved to the modern tradition of the Bar Mitzvah celebration and speech - in which the young man elaborates on some difficult subject Jewish Law in public.
The Mishnah and the Talmud contain timetables, methodology of teaching as well as warning against excessive punishment - which meant Jewish children of both sexes were instructed in law, poetry, liturgy and mathematics in ages when kings were often illiterate.
Under these conditions, the true elite of the Jewish community was neither scholastic or plutocratic. The power of rich men was balanced by the reputation of scholars, whose learning could be appreciated by almost everyone, and vice versa. The public could not be lectured to by power hungry clerics- rabbis finding themselves embarrassed by the superior learning of the most unassuming members of the congregation is both a common tale and one which can be witnessed to this day in many Orthodox communities. Constantinople and Paris both boasted in their turn that their butchers can dispute about theology - for Jews, this was the normal state of things. Rabbis were therefore respected - but not worshipped. They were influential and essential to the running of the community - but were not its masters and did not hold a monopoly over religious life.
There was no central religious body or court in Judaism since the demise of the Sanhedrin in 425.
While for a few centuries more the academies of the Land of Israel and Babylon continued to dispute over seniority, the Jews of the West could hardly send every query to the East. Regional convocations of scholars and dignitaries to discuss religious matters were known to occur from time to time, but wherever they were not instituted on a permanent basis by the power of the State, they were rare - and dealt mostly with such urgent matters as the organization of delegations to beseech the king or some other great lord for protection - usually against his own ill-designs towards them - and the collection of moneys required to remove the evil decree.
All public bodies, therefore, were voluntary caretaking association. Therefore there was great legal flexibility in their structure and function. Townsmen were regarded in Jewish Law, as a sort of partners since they had common interests and duties. Therefore the Law demanded that some framework for cooperation be created - but the Law did not specify the exact structure and procedures of such a framework.
Nevertheless, a certain type came to dominate most local Jewish community chartered organizations - the Qahal. While Qehiloth varied in the specific of administration, largely they were miniature republics consisting of the a few basic elements:
An elected board of (lay) officers,
A court of three judges (in some places it was a permanent panel. In others, only the Rabbi and Father of the Court's position was permanent, the other two seats rotating between local scholars), a treasurer, a board of almoners and other officers besides the Rabbi.
These offices were usually elective ones, and the Goodmen of the City as the Board was called (which commonly numbered 7, but other formulations were known to exist) could establish local statutes, Taqqanoth, who would be recorded in Pinqas HaQahal- the Public Minutes, which are, to these day, a great source of historical research.
Taxation- whether for the direct needs of the Qahal or for payments to the authorities- was decided either by consensus or by majority vote of the tax-paying heads of households, assembled under oath (the population was usually small enough to allow this form of direct vote).
Besides the official bodies of the Qahal, there was a proliferation what we may call civil society associations - partnerships and corporations assembled for profit, professional guilds and religious companies dedicated to particular acts of piety- charity, hospitality, recitation of psalms and so forth. This was very similar to the dynamics of the Christian city- which existed in parallel to the Jewish one, usually under the aegis of one lord- usually both were of the same age, especially in Germany, were Jews played a role in the urbanization of newly acquired territories.
Besides voluntary charitable associations, every Jewish Qahal had consistently maintained certain charitable institutions from antiquity to the modern era: a tamhui, literally a basket, that is, an office charged with collecting and disbursing food for the poor (sometimes to their hands, sometimes in the form of a communal kitchen), a quppah - that is a charity box from which cash would be given to the needy, an arrangement for the sheltering of the homeless and the transient- whether in private houses of volunteers or a dedicated place- and a holy company of undertakers, who treated and buried the dead of residents and guests alike. Those institutions are testified in various sources from the time of the Mishnah, medieval sources testify that we have never seen an Israelite Qahal which lacked them, and they have survived until this very day in many communities. They all existed to discharge a legal and religious duty laid by the Almighty on every Jew and his community- thou shalt give, thou shalt open your hands to thy poor brother; thy poor brother shall live with thee:
הֲל֨וֹא פָרֹ֤ס לָרָעֵב֙ לַחְמֶ֔ךָ וַעֲנִיִּ֥ים מְרוּדִ֖ים תָּ֣בִיא בָ֑יִת כִּֽי־תִרְאֶ֤ה עָרֹם֙ וְכִסִּית֔וֹ וּמִבְּשָׂרְךָ֖ לֹ֥א תִתְעַלָּֽם׃
It is to share your bread with the hungry,
And to take the wretched poor into your home
When you see the naked, to clothe them,And not to ignore your own kin.
(Isaiah 58:7)
Parallel institution existed in the medieval Christian city- but the Burgesses did not see them as an integral part of the essence of their political organization. The City Fathers fed the poor since it was the Christian thing to do - but that was not the mission of the City.
It cannot be argued that the Christian city, unlike the Qahal, carried the burden of defense and therefore couldn't focus on charity- since charity was carried out on the Christian side, and Jews did participate in city defense when needed- it was merely that the Burgesses and the Qahal had divergent views of public life- for the Christians, it was a separate realm from the spiritual life, which intermingled, meddled and overlapped with the temporal city- the City of Man, but never became one with it. For the Jew, just as there was no clear difference between clergy and laity, there was no clear difference between Beit HaVaad - the Chambers of the Council - and Beit HaKnesset- the Synagogue. Both where raised to discharge a duty towards God and Man. Both involved the entire public but were voluntary associations and human inventions to facilitate the better fulfillment of God's Law. Both were the scenes of acts of the same nature- which we may term civic piety. To correct the weights and measurements used at the market. To raise funds fir the ransom of captives. To force abusive husbands to divorce their wives. To establish a new Rabbinic Academy. To organize public days of fast. To arm for the defense of the city- all these were not merely, in the abstract, of equal value before God- they all belonged to the single category of obeying God's commandments.
The Exile and the Fall
The reason for the divergent attitude to governance and the divide between the Spiritual and the Temporal spheres was theological- as most practical questions of administration are at the bottom.
Both Jews and Christians agreed on two great principles:
they were not home, and the World was broken.
Each camp, however, found these great spiritual facts manifested in a different manner..
The Christians, following St. Augustin's teachings, saw their lives as a part of the great cosmic drama of the Fall of Man:
Archangel Lucifer had rebelled against the Almighty. God had cast him and the angels that have joined him - who turned into evil spirits, demons- to Hell, the realm of darkness and perdition, the place / void most removed from God inasmuch as any place can be so. God have created Man, a free willing moral agent, to love and to share the joys of Heaven with Him. Lucifer, in his envy, tempted Adam and Eve to eat from the forbidden fruit- allowing Death, Sin and Evil to enter the World and corrupt it. For the next millenia, Man was damned to fall to Hell after death, since all were tainted from birth by Sin. God had mitigated this disaster by giving Mankind- and in particular the Nation of Israel - laws which would make them as close to the Divine as possible in a Fallen State. Finally God himself, in the person of the Son, had become a man by the name of Jesus of Nazareth, who died accused of a crime he didn't commit. Thus, taking upon Himself Death and Sin, God had made even them close to Him, thus eliminating them as the Domain of Satan- thus redeeming Humanity, past, present and future- from the grip of Hell. From now on, those who chose to embrace Christ shall be cleansed from Sin and will not know Death as all men used to do- only those who clung to Sin and to Death as it used to be were placing themselves in the hands of Satan.
But more importantly, the relationship between the Christian and Christ through the Church (The Visible Body of Christ) has been personal - Christ did not only saved Humanity writ large but every single human being who accepted salvation through him.
The Roman - and the Post-Roman city and later states - was not of Christian design and had was not, from the start, a Christian institution, but an institution that Christians - laymen, priests and monastics alike - found themselves in charge of it as the Empire Christianized in an ever-accelerating pace. Christian citizens, magistrates, emperors had no desire to upend 12 centuries of Roman law where it did not clash with Christian principles. As a matter of fact, they sought to Christianize the institutions of the State, and as they did that - the experience clergymen acquired in administering it was found useful in Church affairs - the Emperor acquired some ecclesiastical characteristic - but the Bishop acquired some Imperial ones - without the emperor becoming a bishop or the Bishop and emperor.
In the aftermath of the Fall of the Empire in the West, the Church had found itself split between the Roman East - which remained under the control of the Empire - and the West, where a hodgepodge of new tribes, peoples, kingdoms and minor kingdoms vied for power. The Eastern Church chose to remain, until the fall of the East in 1492, an Imperial institution - priests were accepted from all tribes and ethnic groups, but they were expected to change their names to Roman (or rather Byzantine-Greek) names. The Emperor continued to take part in the councils of the Church and had great say over doctrine, that often led to clashes with both the eastern churches (who gradually passed out of his control in the Muslim conquests) and the Pope.
As we have seen it was the Papacy's policy to escape Temporal Power - but more important than that, the Western Church became a neutral ground, where laymen and clergy were not expected to assume the identity of Romans but that of Christians, leaving their nationality at the door. Latin became everyone's liturgical and intellectual language but no one's mother tongue. Prelates and popes could come from every nation to preside over the institutions of every other nation. The most famous scholar of the High Middle Ages was Thomas Aquinas - a Sicilian monk of mixed Lombard and Norman heritage. Over his long and distinguished career, he had taught in Paris, Naples, Rome, and buried in Toulouse. He was, through his life, the subject of at least 4 different sovereign states.
And so it is made clear that since the World is yet a fallen realm and Man's true home is in Heaven, that the spheres of activity that guide Man's life ought to be divided in two- the City of Man, administering to his physical needs for sustenance and safety, and the City of God, or the Church, ministering to his spiritual needs and guiding him closer to Heaven.
Jews saw the world in quite a different way.
In the beginning, God had made the World, and He saw that it was good. He then created Man - a Creature who was like God in his ability to reason and to discern and chose - and placed him in the World for his own benefit and enjoyment - and at the best portion of the world at that - the Earthly Paradise, the Garden in Eden of the East. He gave Man Law to follow so Man may achieve Ithe ultimate good- to become partner to God, even symbolically, in Creation and Order- the Law was to work the garden and keep it and to not eat from the Tree of Knowing Good and Evil - and here knowing serves in the Biblical sense of intermingling. Thus, Man was given a field to the full realization of his unique potential as the only creature capable of choosing to serve and obey God. But Man had chose evil and sinned against God. But God would not suffer His Will to be overturned- Adam (lit. Man in the Hebrew) the Person shall die, as will his wife and all his children- but the Race of Man shall stand forever and all men and women shall have the same opportunity their first parents had - to face the choice to turn themselves and the World which was given to them towards God or draw it and themselves further apart from it- but no more shall one man have the power to doom and marr all Creation.
But the Race of Man had chosen, generation after generation, to move further and further away- but God always found few righteous men - or even one- who could give hope for humanity and the world. There were ten generations between Adam and Noah, there were ten generations between Noah and Abraham - and all these generations full of wickedness and corruption were worth it to reach Abraham, who found favor in the eyes of God.
God offered Abraham a Covenant Everlasting- not of power or dominion, but of a blessed burden- he shall become the father of a nation, dwelling in a land of hills and mountains, not as Egypt, that garden of greenery which us watered by one's feet- but that is drinking water from the rains of Heaven - a land the eyes of the Lord are upon it from the beginning of the year to its end. The conditions were similar to the old Adamite covenant- the land shall be fruitful and blessed by following God's Law, which shall guide the Israelites closer to God and, by following their example - the whole world, until God shall make the World whole again so the souls of the Righteous shall return to the Land of the Living, and God shall dwell amongst Man, at that day, God shall be One, and His name One.
The Nation of Israel had sinned, repeatedly and consistently. God, who foresaw this eventuality, had warned them by the prophets which was His unique gift to them. Finally God had fulfilled the negative part of the Covenant - since the Temple, the Kingship and the Land became, by their own sins, barriers between the Israelites and God rather than bridges, He had removed them. He had allowed them to return to the Land and rebuild the Temple, but the same pattern repeated itself. Therefore the Nation of Israel had lost its hold over the Land of Israel, and the Temple was destroyed and yet even then, as they were in the land of their enemies, He had not despised them nor put them at a distance, to annihilate them or to break His Covenant with them. For As the new Earth and the New Heavens which He shall create at the end of time, thus shall stand your seed and your name. The Nation of Israel was sent to exile for correction - and once God deems that have been fulfilled He shall send a redeemer that shall restore them to righteousness:
and I shall remove the heart of stone from you and give unto you a heart of flesh.
Lo! I have redeemed ye once more, at the end as I did in the beginning, to be a God unto ye.
As I live, thus saith the Lord, it shall no more be said "By the Life of God who raised Israel from Egypt" but "By the Life of God, who raised Israel from the Northern Land and all other lands where He had scattered them forth" and I shall return them to the land which I have given to their fathers.
Once this has been achieved, the work of Israel could resume until the aforementioned happy ending of history, Aharit HaYamim - The End of Days - that is, the goal all the days of the World were in preparation for. the reason being, that Divine covenants cannot be broken - they are anchored in the unchanging eternity of the Divine will, of Truth Himself. Therefore, the End of Days aims at nothing less than the fulfillment of the old Adamite Covenant - to which the Noahide, Israelite, Levitic-Aaronite and Davidic Covenants all are details, which the Eternal have foreseen and decreed before the Beginning of the World.
Therefore the Jews did not see the affairs of the World as different from that of Heaven. Jews traditionally believe in reward and punishment after death, but as we established, the goal and final destination of all souls is not Heaven or Hell but the World in its final, redeemed and perfected stage which they shall arrive at after the Resurrection and the Great and Fearful Day of the Lord, whether to everlasting shame or to everlasting glory. The World was not as much broken, at least not in the sense human hands could repair it. Rather, the Jewish community saw itself as a government in exile, and was determined to follow the Law and cling to the Covenant of God in whatever circumstances it found itself in. The small Jewish republic was wholly Jewish - or at least, if it incorporated elements of Roman state practices and procedure to its public life it was done because it found those measures easy, convenient and pleasant to the Jewish basic structure - which Jewish Law permitted, as it is very flexible in matters of public institutions and local practices.
To conclude, the great theme of the Christian worldview is the Fall: Satan had fallen "like lightening" and he had caused Man and the World to fall from Grace. The solution to the Fall was Salvation: God went down unto the fallen world and lifted Mankind - or the portion of it willing to be lifted - back to its place. He trampled over Satan. He proved Death and Sin incapable of pulling Humanity down to hell.
The great theme of Judaism is exile- Adam was exiled for his sins, who rendered him unfit to dwell in Eden. Abraham was exiled from his homeland and father's home, since they no longer fitted his godly life. His descendants were exiled, but shall return to their homeland and Sinaiac righteousness, before the whole world shall come hither to witness "God and His Redemption".
From the beginning, Judaism understood spiritual movemen in both vertical terms an horizontal one- down to Egypt, Babylon, bondage, Sheol and Death, upward to the Promised Land, up the Mountain of the Lord, up to Life, to Holiness- but also outward and inward, nearer or further to God, the polluted person cries "Away! Away!" and so does the Holy of Holies- Man ought to avoid that which may pollute him or that which he may pollute, but ultimately he is meant for holy things, not polluted ones. He is meant to find his proper place. Christianity emphasized the vertical movement- that straight and narrow road between Heaven and Hell- and the more divorced a Christian sect became from the mother-faith the more pronounced it became, the world of the gnostic being reduced to a mathematical line between two points- but the gnostics were condemned, and pilgrimage was the cement of Christendom.
I: The Renaissance and its Consequences
It is tempting to attribute the the renaissance to the economic blooming of Europe in the late 1300s and the early 1400s. The theory argues, with some force of logic, that greater affluence allowed for greater dedication for learning - which in turn produced the intellectual achievements of the era.
But the fortunes of Europe have been rising steadily since the 10th century, the Crusades, with all their brutality, bloodshed and lost resources, proved that Latin Christendom had excess energy and materiel sufficient to carry out a huge military undertaking - equal, if not superior, to the efforts of Justinian and Belisarius in the West in the 7th century. It also shows that such a wealth is not a sufficient explanation for intellectual flowering - the resources could have been easily squandered on another crusade. Besides, even if we would expect that material prosperity by necessity lead to intellectual effort, there was still no explanation from that prosperity to why this intellectual effort took the specific shape that it did.
Instead we must pay attention to what Western scholars have been doing before the renaissance.
For a very long period, the Christian West was nurturing growing interest in the wisdom and practices of the ancient world.
Indeed that interest had never died entirely in the West - the legend of dour monks scrapping priceless copies of Aristotle's Poetics to clear the parchment for another manuscript of the Gospels are just that - legends, and malicious ones at that. The Church had great interest in The Philosopher as he was known and the entire field of scholastic theology was constructed on his method of logic.
It was of such great importance to churchmen to lay their hands on Greek and Roman works that they even countenanced close cooperation with Jewish scholars translating into Latin the Arabic translations to these works long circulating in the Islamic world - including their commentaries.
One can say that the principle change in European society between the 10th and the 15th century was not its accumulation of wealth but of knowledge. Europeans were no longer satisfied with translations of translations - not even with the Arabic translations - they wished to encounter directly the words of the Greek philosophers, without having to resort to the guidance of a translator. Fortunately, the Crusades had given Italian merchants more than a foothold in Constantinople- the capital of a Greek speaking empire, where one could find the philosophers transmitted in their original tongue, and good teachers in both the classic and vernacular forms of that language.
This movement was born out of a relatively new institution - the University.
In short, there have been academies and associations of scholars in Europe since the times of Plato, which have spread outward of Athens with Graeco-Roman civilization. The Carolingian Renaissance added royal monastic and cathedral schools aimed at spreading knowledge and to accredit teachers of theology in the benefit of the local diocese. By the early 13th century the Pope had taken the revolutionary step of sanctioning the first autonomous nising certain scholarly associations and declaring that scholars trained by them and earned the degree of magister - can teach everywhere, without need for further authorization.
This allowed for the movement of scholars across Europe not merely by invitation of particular princes poaching for star theologians but also of lesser scholars seeking the best sources of knowledge. The hunt for the best, clearest teaching became the base for an academic ethic of those wandering and corresponding scholars - It is therefore no surprise that the hunt for the best teachers would beget a hunt for the best books. Our modern ideal of research - of repeated rooting through fundamental sources, layers of commentary and correspondence with contemporary interpreters, instead of relying on a single local tradition - was crafted at that time.
This new knowledge, together with the parallel development of professional and commercial guilds (that perhaps inspired it) had brought Europe its new wealth. Europe first enriched its mental and social life, what Marxians would call the superstructure before attaining the so called material base. The error of the Marxists and other Materialists is that wealth itself, beyond the satisfaction of the needs of mere subsistence - is a social construct. The theoretical savage in the state of nature who has no concept of material attainment beyond that of any animal has no idea that he is poor - as long as his belly his filled. It is only after he had reached the idea of his own human distinction that he acquires other needs - who arise from his mental world, not physical body.
II: Christian Humanism and Devotional Movements
This hunt for better books, better teaching and better knowledge was soon in search of self-justification. Why was it important to find all these things, beyond the need for better theology? could there be a better theology than the one handed down by traditional means? and if so, does it mean that rather than declining, the - spiritual - state of the world is improving?
The answer was soon found - one should seek not merely better knowledge but to become a better, more whole, human being - to treat the self as a great work , which ought to be made perfect in its beauty and function.
When applied to Christian life, the initial instinct of thinkers such as Gerardus Magnus and Thomas a Kempis was Imitatio Dei - since Christian doctrine held that Jesus has been the perfect man as well (and because) of his Divine nature, it therefore follow that the closer one comes to the model of his life, as described in the Gospels, the closer one comes to make of oneself a perfect work in the honor of God.
The immediate way to achieve this was to adopt the monastic way of life to laymen. After all, the entirety of the monastic Rule was designed to imitate the lives of the Apostles. If the Apostles themselves lived this way, and if the Christian ideal was to imitate Christ, therefore it follow that one cannot go too wrong by imitating the Apostles. Men and women joined these new religious communities without taking all the vows to officially be in holy orders. Such movements were especially noticeable in Northern Europe - where Humanism was particularly Christian, as opposed to Southern Europe where it had a more Classicist focus.
But soon, the critique of this neo-monastic movement came. Careful reading of the Gospels, argued many scholars, shows that Jesus never meant to imitate him. He, they argue, cannot be a true model for human life since, unlike all other human beings, he was born without sin. For a poor sinner to pretend he could imitate the perfect life of Christ was not just the epitome of Pride, it was outright blasphemous. Even the life of the Apostles, touched by the Holy Spirit and granted a special mission by Jesus, was not a proper model for imitation for the common Christian.
Instead, the Christian believer should focus on living his life not according to the example of Jesus and the Apostles but their teachings.
Christian scriptures offer many avenues for that: the main problem for many humanist thinkers was to find a unifying principle around which Christian righteousness cab be cohered. Between the Fruits of the Spirit, the abstract notion of Wisdom, Grace and Justification, ethical scholars such as Erasmus of Rotterdam labored to construct an image not of Christ, but of a Christian, that could be emulated by the common believer.
Of particular interests to many Christian Humanist was the understanding of what they called The Old Law: not only did Jesus emphasis that he had not come to remove one iota of the Law, the spirit of Humanism itself demanded a fuller understanding of the subject under query, and how could the lives of Jesus and the Apostles - Jews all, who, according to the Gospels, lived and died in perfect obedience to the Law - be intelligible without knowledge of that Law as it was actually practiced?
The problem that this new approach encountered was twofold: It seemingly contradicts one of the most fundamental principles of Latin Christianity. It also seemingly ran counter to the intelectual fashion in the birthplace of the new interest in ancient teaching- Italy, where religiosity seemed to be waning under the newly rediscovered words of the Pagans.
III: The Challengers Revived - Pelagius and Cicero
In the early 5th Century, there lived in Roman Britain a Christian named Pelagius.
Pelagius (who may or may not have been a Briton who latinized his native name Morgan) came to loggerheads with the rising bishop of Hippo Regius, Augustine, over the question of Original Sin.
As we have already discussed, Medieval Christians universally followed the Augustinian teaching that the Original Sin of Adam infected all Mankind and therefore, without the Grace of God and the sacrifice of Jesus, no atonement, that is restoration to the State of Grace in which Man existed before the Fall can be achieved. Man may labor for Justification, to make himself right with God, but to no avail. Only once Man abandons himself to God's mercy and declares his own helplessness would Grace come upon him and redeem him, not merely from the jaws of hell after death, but from a life of wickedness and sin.
Pelagius reasoned otherwise. Since God is good and the creator of all things, he argued, there can be no truly evil things in the World. Forbidden things are forbidden for misuse - not due to some intrinsic evil nature. Therefore, he argued, while most men sin, and therefore require Grace to be rescued from their sinful state, it does not follow that Mankind carries the burden of sin from birth. Therefore, theoretically, if one obeys the laws of Moses and the teaching of Jesus thoroughly and without failing through his entire life, this person can leave the World the way he came into it - without ever encountering sin.
The Augustinians countered that as experience had shown, no man can follow all the teachings of Jesus to the letter in his natural state. The Pelagians argued that even if all men sin and require therefore the gift of grace, that does not follow that they are born sinners. The relevance of the question of infant baptism. Augustinians affirmed the traditional practice of baptising infants to place them in a state of Grace at the beginning of life. Pelagians believed the practice to be useless, since infants are incapable of sin until they have reached the age of reason.
Augustine countercharged by saying that such reasoning diminished the love of God and the gift of Christ. First, he establishes that the Blessedness is not a thing which Man can reach by natural means:
And on this account, faith, by which men believe in God, is above all things necessary in this mortal life, most full as it is of errors and hardships.
For there are no good things whatever, and above all, not those by which any one is made good, or those by which he will become blessed, of which any other source can be found whence they come to man, and are added to man, unless it be from God.
...
For this, they say, is like Terence's wise saying,— "Since that cannot be which you will, will that which thou canst." That this is aptly said, who denies? But it is advice given to the miserable man, that he may not be more miserable. And it is not rightly or truly said to the blessed man, such as all wish themselves to be, That cannot be which you will. For if he is blessed, whatever he wills can be; since he does not will that which cannot be. But such a life is not for this mortal state, neither will it come to pass unless when immortality also shall come to pass. And if this could not be given at all to man, blessedness too would be sought in vain, since it cannot be without immortality.
(On the Trinity, 13:10)
He then continues to explain how by God's grace alone Man was redeemed by the incarnation. He elucidates his opinion on the matter - with all of man disability to achieve blessed state on his own due to the Original Sin, God has already made His peace with them, merely seeking to bring Mankind to Him, which was done by the incarnation, when Christ adopted human nature to himself and thus redeemed it. He dismisses out of hand the Pelagian assertion that Original Sin gives excessive power and authority to the Devil:
By the justice of God in some sense, the human race was delivered into the power of the devil; the sin of the first man passing over originally into all of both sexes in their birth through conjugal union, and the debt of our first parents binding their whole posterity.
This delivering up is first signified in Genesis, where, when it had been said to the serpent, "Dust shalt thou eat," it was said to the man, "Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return." In the words, "Unto dust shalt thou return," the death of the body is fore-announced, because he would not have experienced that either, if he had continued to the end upright as he was made; but in that it is said to him whilst still living, "Dust thou art," it is shown that the whole man was changed for the worse. For "Dust thou art" is much the same as, "My spirit shall not always remain in these men, for that they also are flesh." Therefore it was at that time shown, that he was delivered to him, in that it had been said to him, "Dust shalt thou eat."
...
But the way in which man was thus delivered into the power of the devil, ought not to be so understood as if God did this, or commanded it to be done; but that He only permitted it, yet that justly.
For when He abandoned the sinner, the author of the sin immediately entered. Yet God did not certainly so abandon His own creature as not to show Himself to him as God creating and quickening, and among penal evils bestowing also many good things upon the evil.
For He hath not in anger shut up His tender mercies. Nor did He dismiss man from the law of His own power, when He permitted him to be in the power of the devil; since even the devil himself is not separated from the power of the Omnipotent, as neither from His goodness.
For whence do even the evil angels subsist in whatever manner of life they have, except through Him who quickens all things? If, therefore, the commission of sins through the just anger of God subjected man to the devil, doubtless the remission of sins through the merciful reconciliation of God rescues man from the devil.
(Ibid, 13:12)
Pelagius was condemned as a heretic by a council convened in Carthage by Augustine in 418 and banished from Jerusalem, where he hitherto resided under the protection of Bishop John II. It is important to note that despite this condemnation Pelagius maintained good relationships with many orthodox churchmen, including Archbishop Cyril of Alexandria who sheltered him afterwards. There was no matter to that- Pelagius was never reproached for any personal failing or crime. His entire danger to orthodoxy was in his teachings, and as they were thoroughly rejected, there was no reason to pursue him further.
But wasn't the assertion that Man can make himself whole in the honor of God, that he can become well-rounded and beautiful being, Pelagianism from the back door? this question burdened many Christian humanists in the times of Erasmus. We shall see how they resolved the query.
While Pelagius was resurrected implicitly, another, more ancient writer, was being rediscovered.
There was nothing new about Christians reading the works of Cicero. The Church Fathers read his philosophical works, Medieval lawyers read his legal cases, courtiers sharpened their wits on his oratory. During the early days of the Italian Renaissance, however, Petrarch recovered and assembled his letters. These, which are classics of witty and eloquent Latin style, were often of a very personal nature. Cicero is revealed in them not as an abstract philosopher or a figure of history, silent and colorless as a weather-worn marble bust, but as a man, and a virtuous, attractive, wise and charming man at that. The answer has been, for serious Christians, very clear for centuries:
The goal of the Church and of Christianity was not to create philosophers, statemen and good people in the general sense, but to make Christians and then turn them to saints. Christians ought to at least be as virtuous as the best pagans - or, in Christian terms, they must be in perfect obedience with the moral law - but such virtue is no more than an introduction to the real work of becoming justified and sanctified through Christ. A virtuous sinner, as Augustin wrote is still a sinner and short of the true blessed state of Grace:
But when he who is good and faithful in these miseries shall have come from this life to the blessed life, then will truly come to pass what now is absolutely impossible,—namely, that a man may live as he will. For he will not will to live badly in the midst of that felicity, nor will he will anything that will be wanting, nor will there be wanting anything which he shall have willed. Whatever shall be loved, will be present; nor will that be longed for, which shall not be present. Everything which will be there will be good, and the supreme God will be the supreme good and will be present for those to enjoy who love Him; and what altogether is most blessed, it will be certain that it will be so forever.
But now, indeed, philosophers have made for themselves, according to the pleasure of each, their own ideals of a blessed life; that they might be able, as it were by their own power, to do that, which by the common conditions of mortals they were not able to do,—namely, to live as they would. For they felt that no one could be blessed otherwise than by having what he would, and by suffering nothing which he would not. And who would not will, that the life whatsoever it be, with which he is delighted, and which he therefore calls blessed, were so in his own power, that he could have it continually?
And yet who is in this condition? Who wills to suffer troubles in order that he may endure them manfully, although he both wills and is able to endure them if he does suffer them? Who would will to live in torments, even although he is able to live laudably by holding fast to righteousness in the midst of them through patience?
They who have endured these evils, either in wishing to have or in fearing to lose what they loved, whether wickedly or laudably, have thought of them as transitory. For many have stretched boldly through transitory evils to good things which will last. And these, doubtless, are blessed through hope, even while actually suffering such transitory evils, through which they arrive at good things which will not be transitory. But he who is blessed through hope is not yet blessed: for he expects, through patience, a blessedness which he does not yet grasp. Whereas he, on the other hand, who is tormented without any such hope, without any such reward, let him use as much endurance as he pleases, is not truly blessed, but bravely miserable.
This was clear to ancient Christians - who had the Pagan world with all its glories and horrors all around them, a world which they have made the deliberate choice to leave behind after intimate acquaintance with it and its philosophy, who had a clear idea what they wanted from philosophy and what from the Church (St. Jerome often tormented himself contemplating whether he actually was a follower of Cicero, not of Christ).
But all of this was less clear to the Renaissance men, who lived and died marinated in a world which have been thoroughly christianized 10 centuries before their birth. To them, the encounter with Pagan philosophy, that offered an alternative path to virtue and human perfection, caused almost a crisis of faith - some, like Machiavelli, had tentatively dared to wonder whether trading the Roman Virtù - that hideous strength determined to ride the wild winds of fortune at all costs, taking one's soul, family and state to the utmost heights or the abyss at the end of the journey - for the Christian virtues of meekness, forgiveness, suffering and prudence was, at the end, profitable. In Italy, where this trend was the strongest, licence and appetite were given free reign - if such things did not steer away the Romans from virtue, reasoned many, what's the harm in them (they forgot that many ancient writer bemoans Rome's addiction for pleasure and predicted its decline and fall way in advance).
Another unchristian tendency that the Southern Renaissance fostered was nationalism - Italy was not only the scene of the greatest advancement in this "new learning", it was also the scene of much of the history now being studied- the oratory of Cicero, the Roman civil social and foreign wars, the great building projects of Augustus and Hadrian, even the Eclogues of Virgil took place in environs which were well known to Tuscans, Umbrians and Romagnians.
This was a departure from the traditional stance of the Christian faith. On the one hand, did not deny men the ability to identify with their tribe or country - Bede the Venerable wrote the Ecclesiastic history of his own English people, in Germany, the Franks and the Saxons traded places as the paramount rulers. But the entire policy and principle of the Church, as we have already established, have been the removal of barriers between ethnic and political units, on the spirit of Paul's "neither Jew or Greek" aphorism.
While the Eastern Empire had welcomed everyone willing to integrate into the mainstream imperial culture - the Greek language, the Imperial Orthodoxy, the Byzantine manners and dress, the Western Church had established a new principle for its new Empire - the Translatio Imperii, reinterpreting the Empire itself from a dominion of a specific, Roman people (which may admit into its ranks such worthy individuals and tribes as the Roman State may see fit), into a divine, Christian office of protecting the Church - its leaders, layemen and principles- which may be carried out by any nation most capable of doing so. Thus the Empire passed from the Ρωμαίοι to the Franks, and from them to the Saxons, to the (Eastern) Franks again and then to the German people generally. While the Emperor had no direct opinion over most Catholics, therefore, he could still claim to be the leader of all laymen in Christendom- just as the Pope was the chief cleric.
To a man like Machiavelli, there was no use in those meek patriotisms of service. The Italians, it was clear to him, were superior to all others - by the nobility of their lineage, by the lands they inhabited, by their intellectual, artistic and mercantile achievements. He did not refrain to revive the term barbarians for transalpine fellow-Christians and blame the Church - and Christianity in general - for the military and political inaptitude of the Italians. In his eyes, Cesare Borgia, which have seemed to have cast away all Christian notions of morality and embraced that terrible ancient Virtu of the Romans to be a perfect prince - to create a central Italian State that would be capable of throwing out the Barbarians and then restoring Italy to its rightful place in Europe.
The results of the War of the League of Cambrai had dashed Machiavelli's dream. Cesare Borgia (and most other Italian condottieri) had proven themselves mediocre soldiers at best in European terms. The spirit of Italian national unity would stay dormant until the 19th century - and of Machiavelli's superiority-inferiority complex until the Rule of Mussolini.
IV: The Response
The Church was not inclined to respond to this dual threat by banning the reading of Cicero or condemning humanism. The Papacy itself, now newly united after the Council of Constance (1414-18) had gladly and with great enthusiasm embraced and patronized many Renaissance men - and the resurgent Papal States had become an Italian power, interested mostly in its own territorial aggrandizement. The popes of this era were ambitious, carnal and quarrelsome men - desirous of power, wealth and glory rather than the sanctity and service of the Faithful.
But we must not mistake the corruption of the Papacy for the general corruption of the Church. There were good priests and bad, dedicated, hardworking and saintly bishops, deacons, and cardinals as well as dissolute, lazy, greedy and selfish ones. But on the whole, Christian faith was sincere and deeply held. Even sinful prelates held a certain regard to their official charge- it was pope Calixtus III - born Alfonso de Borgia, uncle of the future Alexander VI - that instituted the Angelus Bell Devotion, one of the most powerful symbols of Catholicism and one which was extremely valuable to many believers. They have not treated their offices as sinecures, but as very real charges. We should not be surprised that ambitious men (and who else is capable of rising to the pinnacle of a great body such as the Church?) would be corrupted by the sudden coming into command of troops, lands, subjects and treasures.
But many of the learned faithful, laymen and clerics alike, were deeply disturbed by these developments and worked diligently to counter them.
We have discussed before the scholarly works of Johann Reuchlin and his Hebraism. But what was the value of understanding the Hebrew Scripture for a devout Catholic believer? the answer is simple - the Hebrew Truth contained, it was a long standing Christian doctrine the Law of God, both the ceremonial and the moral Law. While the former was understood, according to the epistles of Paul, to be dispensed with after the coming of Christ which had (according to Christian doctrine) have been the fulfillment of the Law, the moral Law was perfected and become more demanding - as Christians were expected to abide by a higher manner of conduct beyond the letter of the Law - hence Jesus' aphorism I have come not to strike down anything from the Law but to add to it.
The value of the understanding the Jewish scripture and Jewish learning in general was thus to emphasize Man's inability to fully obey the moral law in his natural, fallen state, as well as image of a redeemed humanity. The Hebraist and Hellenist Christian Humanists, in Martin Luther's own generation and the one immediately preceding it had worked from both ends - to expose the full stature of of the Moral Law and to show by what means Fallen Man can be made capable at obeying it. Righteousness, Holiness, Wholeness, Virtue, Wisdom - all those had been declared not conditions or payments for salvation, but its results. Christian Piety, therefore, was no longer understood as being the attribute of a healthy organ in the body of the Church, but an individual matter. Christ had redeemed Humanity as whole and established the Church - that is the order of Redeemed Humanity, went the thought, but he also saved each man individually.
The moral repercussions of theis anti-Pelagian turn were as significant as the theological ones.
Two cases in particular exemplify the moral turn of the Humanistic mind - the courageous stances of Thomas More, a Catholic layman, and Martin Luther, an Augustine monk and founder of Protestantism . Both were brought before the highest court in the land to be tried for their refusal to comply with a principle espoused by the Church bodies - and temporal powers- of their respective lands. Both took a manly and principled stance in the name of their own individual conscience, intellectual conviction and sense of right. Both paid dearly for it.
The movement we know as the Reformation was not the first of its kind and not even in its origin. The Humanist movement had generated the Hussites in Bohemia and a similar intellectual movement had spurred the Lollardy of John Wycliffe in England a century beforehand, and in the previous one, the Waldensians emerged in Southern France.
All of these movements shared various characteristics:
Trinitarian, emphasized either the outright priesthood of all believers or at least lower the barriers between priests and laymen.
They emphasized justification by faith in the salvation brought about by Jesus's sacrifice alone, rather than by good works while demanding more rigorous attention to such works.
They critiqued or outright condemned the ecclesiastical hierarchy and ceremony (at least partially on the grounds of the prelates affluence and wealth.
They tended to have a tinge of a latter-day enthusiasm in their background. '
These were literacy sects that stressed the need of the believer to read, contemplate and understand the Bible - both Old and New Testaments.
While all these sects survived to this day despite the brutal ends of their founders as well as countless prosecutions against their members, only the Lutheran Reformation came to be practiced by the mainstream of society. Luther was also the only one of them who ended his days in natural death rather than being executed by the State.
V: Alliance and Subjugation:
The success of Lutheranism (paralleled by that of Calvinism) is tied directly to the State.
The Waldensians and similar sects (such as the Henricians, Petrobrusians and Arnoldists) had nothing but contempt for the World (and therefore the powers of the World, that is the State). The Lollards had failed, in Wycliff's own lifetime, to recruit to their aid a great faction inside the English State (headed by John of Gaunt, who ultimately abandoned Wycliff). The Hussite where likewise outmaneuvered and then defeated in their military attempt to conquer themselves a State. Luther and Calvin, however, were able to acquire the full support of great and established States almost from the beginning.
In Luther's case, his personality as well as his scholarly reputation made him a sought after teacher for the high nobility and reading middle class of Germany a long time before 1517, when his famous 95 Theses were published, holding high office in the principality of Saxony and cultivating a fruitful relationship with its ruler.
The slow pace of his initial struggle also helped - the Papacy was not in a hurry to create an unbridgeable dispute with this popular and highly regarded scholar. By the time Luther have been excommunicated, full 3 years after the publication of the Theses, he already have not only a loyal readership of his sermons and broadsides, but one that felt that the Papacy was in the wrong. This readership included many noblemen, even princes of the Empire, secular and ecclesiastic alike. By the time he was summoned to the Diet of Worms in 1521, his support was sufficient for Luther to escape the Emperor's edict for his prosecution, and the subsequent Diets of Nuremberg (1522 and 1524) and Speyer (1526 and 1529) showed the growing popularity of Lutheranism, as more and more princes joined in the refusal to prosecute Luther and his followers.
This process culminated in the protest at the conclusion of the 1529 diet, when six princes and the representatives of 14 imperial cities had left the chamber and presented the Imperial representative with an official Letter of Protest, effectively placing themselves outside of the ecclesiastic order of the Empire, and by extension, the primacy of the Pope.
The Protestant princes had no intention to excise themselves from the body of the Church or the Imperial order - on the contrary, they held that the true opinion of the Church can be established only in an ecumenical council or at least a national one comprising all Christians - and pending such a Council, each prince and state must enforce in their territories the teachings of Christianity in the way that seems to them most correct:
... And it has always been considered at all Diets, that a fitting limit for this matter could not be found, unless a free ecumenical, Christian council, or at least national assembly, should be held as soon as possible.
And this we now declare, in order that your Highness, princes, and the others, each and every one, may judge from this and may yourselves appoint when it seems right or proper for one party to seek before a free, Christian, general Council approval or condemnation of the doctrine which it holds as Christian.
These matters cannot be so fully and formally discussed and treated by presidents, commissioners, orators, appointed by his imperial Majesty, or by electors, princes and other estates of the Empire, as by the said Council. Nor could the discordant and doubtful doctrines and practices, of which they themselves are now not certain, be heard and decided.
...
Likewise, as it was further set forth in the Committee’s report, that the minister should preach and teach the holy Gospel according to the interpretation of Scripture approved and received by the holy Christian Church,—that would pass very well if all parties were agreed as to what is the true, holy Christian Church.
But so long as there is great contention about this, and there is no certain preaching of doctrine, then [we purpose] to abide by the word of God alone, since indeed according to the command of God nothing else shall be preached, and to make clear and explain one text of holy, divine Scripture by another, as indeed this same holy, divine Scripture, in all things needful for Christian men to know, will be found in itself clear and bright enough to illumine all darkness.
Therefore we purpose, with the grace and help of God, to abide by it to the end, that only the word of God and the holy Gospel of the Old and New Testaments, as contained in the biblical books, shall be preached clearly and purely, and nothing that is against it.
For with that, as the one truth and the correct rule of all Christian doctrine and life, no one can err or fail, and whoso builds on it and endures shall prevail against all the gates of hell. Nevertheless, on the other hand, all human additions and trifles shall fail, and cannot stand before God.
...
After all, we expect from your royal Highness, princes, and others, as our dear and gracious uncles, cousins, friends and especially esteemed ones, as we also once more kindly request and humbly pray, that you become willing again to bring to mind the occasion of this action, and our complaint, and consider with diligence the ground and reason of the same, and allow yourselves to be moved by nothing against the former decree, unanimously concluded, pledged, written and sealed; and not act as nobody has justice, power and right to do, for reasons mentioned and others well-founded, which it is best now not to repeat.
And if ... then we herewith PROTEST and testify openly before God, our sole Creator, Preserver, Redeemer and Saviour (who, as we mentioned before, alone searches and knows all hearts, and therefore will judge justly) likewise before all men and creatures, that we for ourselves, our subjects and in behalf of all, each and every one, consider null and void the entire transaction and the intended decree, which in the aforementioned or in other cases, is undertaken, agreed and passed, against God, his holy word, all our soul’s salvation and good conscience, likewise against the formerly announced decree of the Diet of Speyer—[and we protest] not secretly, nor willingly, but for reasons above stated and others good and well founded.
This protest we are compelled to issue and to make a more thorough and true report to his imperial Majesty, our gracious Lord.
To the same effect yesterday, with reference to the rendered, intended decree, we thereupon through our Protest (made in haste, which we also herewith repeat) let our mind be plainly known; and besides we offered nevertheless, until the aforementioned general and free Christian Council or national assembly, by divine help and in conformity with the contents of the aforesaid decree of the former Diet of Speyer, in our jurisdictions, and among and with our subjects and kindred, that we will so hold, live and rule as we hope and trust to answer for ourselves before Almighty God and his Roman imperial Majesty, as a Christian Emperor.
Whatever also concerns ... we desire to be in accord with his imperial Highness, the princes, and the others; also we consider the contents of the same articles to be in every respect proper.
We also bind ourselves to extend further our aforesaid complaints and Protest, and whatever besides our further necessity demands with regard to everything. And above all we desire, unquestionably expect and are satisfied that his Roman imperial Majesty will graciously hold and manifest himself toward us as a gracious Christian Emperor, loving God above all things, and our gracious Lord, in consideration of our Christian, honorable, honest and immutable minds and due obedience.
Wherein we hereupon may also render friendly and voluntary service and may show kind and gracious inclinations to your royal Highness, princes, and the others, as our dear and gracious uncles, cousins, friends and especially esteemed ones. That we are willing and inclined to do out of friendship, also from voluntary obedience, goodwill and Christian love and duty.
Done at Speyer on the twentieth day of April, and in the 1529th year after the birth of Christ, our dear Lord and Saviour.
(Signed) John, Duke of Saxony, Elector. George, Margrave of Brandenburg. Ernest, Duke of Luneburg. Philip, Landgrave of Hesse. Wolf [gang], Prince of Anhalt.
As we can see Lutheranism did not start its way as a revolt or a schism against Rome or the Empire - the expressed wish of the princes was to continue the previous order of the Church and the State, but on their own terms, and to settle doctrinal disputes in their traditional venue - that is a Church Council, which would have been more dangerous to the Papal party than to them.
After all, they could always declare the results of such a council null and void if it turns against them as opposed to Scripture. But if the Papal party shall lose in such a council, than they would have justified them, this would be ablow which the Pope could not recover from, as it would give them official justification to dismiss his authority. As a matter of fact, this was exactly the course that they have taken when such a council have been called in Trent and has established what is commonly termed the Counter Reformation, and to which the Protestants were not invited.
One may take to note their qualifications: Free, General and Christian Council - a council into which they would not be invited could be construed as particular, not general. If the Pope presides over it and have the power veto, it would be argued to be unfree, and if its conclusion would have contradicted scripture - that is, the Protestant interpretation of Scripture- it would be argued to not be Christian. Therefore such a Council would have to begin with accept the protestants as Christians in good standing, deny the primacy of the Pope and not make any decision contrary to the Lutheran understanding of Scripture - in other words, it would have to be a Protestant council - not that they can be accuse of insincerity, since the alternative would have been a Catholic Council which would have declared them heretics ab initio. This impasse, rather than exposing insincerity on the side of either party, actually demonstrates that both were, in fact, due to their sincere and deep differences, already two separate Churches.
In the case of John Calvin, he came to Geneva, a city-state already in a state of separation from the Empire and already determined to embrace religious reformation. This State, after some internal struggle, had agreed to not only adopt him as their official spiritual guide (head of ministers) but went out of its way to attract more Calvinists, especially teachers and theologians to the city.
In both cases the political side of the Reformation was a demand that each person shall be allowed to maintain his own religion, but rather that each state shall have the prerogative to determine the proper form of Christian worship and teachings according to the conscience of their rulers. The result have been the reversal of the entire medieval Papal struggle to make the Church into a truly independent body, since even in Catholic lands, while the rulers would bind themselves to the authority of Rome, since the option to go over to the other side would always be open to them, the Church became dependent on the State, as the career of Henry VIII of England had demonstrated. In short we can say that the true victor of the Reformation struggle was not Martin Luther of 1517 - that sincere scholar declaring his honest conscience against all authority but the Elector of Saxony.
VI: This Other Eden - The Reformation in England
The Reformation did not come to England as a result of a theological or ritual dispute but a political and a legal one.
In short, Henry VIII had attributed his inability to produce a male (and therefore, indisputable) heir to his throne to the invalidity of the Papal dispensation issued to his father, which have allowed the then-prince-of-Wales to marry Catherine of Aragon, the widow of his deceased elder brother, Prince Arthur. After a long and arduous process, the Papal representative concluded that dispensation, and therefore the marriage, were very valid. Henry then found that the Church of England had been always an autonomous body, similar to the Orthodox churches of the East, and independent of the authority of the Bishop of Rome.
One may recall that the German protestants declared they would be satisfied with a National Council to resolve their differences with the Catholics.
In England, a single Nation-State such a council could be easily convened The council (first in the form of a Parliament and than in the 1563 Convocation of Canterbury) had confirmed that the Pope could have not granted a dispensation against God's Law and, in fact, had no jurisdiction in this realm. Therefore the king was a bachelor, Katherine a widow, their daughter Mary a bastard and Anne Boleyn could be married to His Majesty at his earliest convenience and pleasure.
Unlike the situation in Germany, while the Reformation had deep roots in England, Henry did not adopt the native beliefs and attitudes of his subjects, which he a ctively suppressed as heretical.
Instead, he had imposed on high a Catholicism without the Pope which had no sincere believers in his realm - those who leaned towards Catholicism, were loyal to Rome, for the most part. Those who nursed either the old Lollard reformation or the new Lutheran reformation, rejected the King's doctrinal stances.
Henry attempted to impose his new Church on the common people with fire and sword, which had availed him nothing.
While it was his interest to drift from Rome over time (as he did in his dissolution of the monasteries, his vernacular Bible and other measures), he still held on to the Roman understanding of the Mass and other subjects, which he himself had defended against Luther in the early stages of the German Reformation.
But due to the unsustainable situation of this compromise, we find Henry's successors falling into one of the two camps - either completely embracing Lutheran doct -rine (as his son Edward did during his brief reign), returning to Rome (as did Mary) or embracing Calvin- except in the organizational structure of the Church, where the old episcopal succession was maintained. Another result was that, in the reign of three successive monarchs, every single Christian in England had found himself , at one point or another, declared a beret -ic, and in most cases, the Church did not correspond to the full doctrinal belief of anyone.
The result was that the Church of England was never taken seriously as an authoritative body which can declared true doctrine from false ones.
Rather, it was a body within which all believers must be members and seek broad consensus rather than a precise agreement. For this reason, there could be Lutheran Anglicans and Calvinists ones, High Churchmen indistinguishable from continental Catho -lies at times, as well as low-Churchmen abhorring any embellishment and ceremony. At times, the English State had sought greater control and uniformity within the Church, such as during the reigns of James I and Charles I, the rule of the Puritans and the abrogated reign of James II. But the result of such attempts were usually disastrous. The Glorious Revolution and the religious settlement which Dr. Samuel Johnson praise were a tacit agreement that general Protestantism within the framework cif the National Church was a condition for political rights, but not for the natural, inborn and inherent legal freedoms and protections guaranteed to all Englishmen.
That is not to say that there was no dissention in England.
Dissenters were known as those people to whom the settlement of Anglicanism, as broad as it was, have b -een obnoxious; Presbyterians (in Scotland they made up the main body of the Established kirk) who despised the bishops; Calvinists purists who despised the Arminianism finding increase purchase in Anglican Theological circles, Puritans who despised its ornamentation and Worldliness (not unworthy successors to Wycliff!), Quakers, Shakers and other enthusiastic sects who despised its stayed character. Even the solid and loyal gentry came to, from time to time, resent the vicar which held a position c)f power they were not always able to subordinate to their own.
The vicar, indeed, was an interesting creature. He was an appointee of the State, but cannot be construed as a servant of the State or as part of the State apparatus.
He did not collect taxes on behalf of any government department. His records of births, baptisms, marriages and deaths in his parish were kept by himself , not reported to any ministerial office. He did not spy on his congregants nor did he engage in State-propaganda. At most, he had to change his theological positions to comply with the Prevailing attitudes of the day (when the government felt itself in an interventionist mood) and carried prayers on behalf of the sovereign (an act that was, admittedly, during the Civil Wars and the Glorious Revolution was a political one). One could glean the general tendency of the vicar's heart from the manner in which he chose to carry out Divine Service and the contents of his sermons; but the vicar was I -o a degree dependant in the former on the lay-vestrymen, that is, the local gentry. He did not depend on the State for his salary which was guaranteed by tithes.
This living (which could be good or bad depending on the resources of the local parish) made the vicar (and his flock) an autonomous unit and afforded them great latitude under the authority of the local Bishop and the Archbishop of Canterbury - as long as they did not go too far (Heresy trials were always a rarity, but they were brought back by the York synod of 1999 after a certain prominent churchman declared his unbelief in the Resurrection, the virgin birth or the crucifixion of Jesus). This autonomous unit could escape the eye of the State and conduct itself in a more or less harmonious internal existence. It is no accident that in the early pages of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the Pilgrim had to content with his townsmen, who are perfectly happy in their little harmonious community, the ominously named City of Destruction.
VII: Intermediate Conclusion:
We have seen how Western Christianity changed, during the humanistic period, its character, from a collective religion to an individualistic one.
The Humanists - both those who turned to the Reformation and those who stayed within the framework of the Catholic Church - did not think that they were innovating a new form of Christianity or altering its essential character. Rather, they sought to restore the ancient forms of personal piety as they are reflected in the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers.
By going back to the wellsprings of Christianity, which originated in individuals who were Jews themselves or were more familiar with Jewish teachings and culture than most Christians were at the beginning of the 14th century, and doing so by directly seeking Jewish teachings and books, They could not fail in bringing Christianity closer to its Jewish roots and Christian to their Jewish contemporaries in terms of organization, values and the role of the Laity.
This process was not restricted to the Reformation Churches - the Catholic Counter-Reformation had reinvigorated the education of the laymen and secular priesthood alike, and granted more discretion and power to the local parish. It impressed the importance of good works of faith such as genuine charity and reorganized various bodies to deal with the problem of corruption.
But while Judaism continued to be autonomous of the State, both the Reformation Churches and the Catholic Churches had found themselves pulled back unto its oppressing embrace.
The Reformation have become a political struggle- there was no escape from that fact. Therefore both sides of this struggle found themselves in need of Temporal patronage. Even the Catholic Church which had continued to stress the supremacy of the Pope over all Earthly ruler had to come to terms that in a Christendom divided between itself and the new churches, the loyalty of no ruler can be taken for granted. Spain was perhaps the only state in Europe who could not conceivably turn to Protestantism since it deliberately weakened itself in favor of ecclesiastic institutions which were well entrenched by the time of the crisis, and since it was ruled by the Habsburgs who had made the conscious decision to tie their fate to that of the Church. Every other realm - even the Holy Roman Empire - was on the table.
In the course of the 16th and 17th century, the three great realms of the West will convulse with bloody conflicts aimed at deposing a dynasty leaning towards Rome and establish a solidly Protestant one in its place.
In France, Catholicism had snatched total victory from the jaws of utter defeat. In the Holy Roman Empire, the result was more or less a draw - the Habsburgs retained the Throne, but have lost most of their authority outside of their imperial holding, and the Empire had ceased to exist as a coherent polity. Only in England did protestantism achieve complete dominance of the State and all its territories, but the process by which this was achieved meant that the resulting religious settlement was less oppressive and intolerable to those of the losing side than their equivalents across the Channel.
These were the struggles of the Old World, and while they influence the birth of a new civilization across the Ocean, that new civilization had developed on its own term and merits a different discussion - which, by God's help and mercy, we shall come to expound in the next and final chapter of our discussion.
