Part 58 (1/2)

Some support to the old idea that the Reformation was a progressive movement has been recently offered by eminent scholars. [Sidenote: Recent opinions] G. Monod says that the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism is that the former created a closed philosophy, the latter left much open. ”The Reformation,” according to H. A. L. Fisher, ”was the great dissolvent of European conservatism. A religion which had been accepted with little question for 1200 years, which had dominated European thought, moulded European customs, shaped no small part of private law and public policy . . . was suddenly and sharply questioned in all the progressive communities of the West.”

Bertrand Russell thinks that, while the Renaissance undermined the medieval theory of authority in a few choice minds, the Reformation made the first really serious breach in that theory. It is just because the fight for liberty (which he hardly differentiates from anarchism) began in the religious field, that its triumph is now most complete in that field. We are still bound politically and economically; that we are free religiously is due to Luther. It is an evil, however, in Mr. Russell's opinion, that subjectivism has been fostered in Protestant morality.

A similar opinion, in the most attenuated form, has been expressed by Salomon Reinach. ”Instead of freedom of faith and thought the Reformation produced a kind of attenuated Catholicism. But the seeds of religious liberty were there, though it was only after two centuries that they blossomed and bore fruit, {736} thanks to the breach made by Luther in the ancient edifice of Rome.”

[Sidenote: German nationalists]

A judicious estimate is offered by Imbart de la Tour, to the effect that, though the logical result of some of Luther's premises would have been individual religion and autonomy of conscience, as actually worked out, ”his mystical doctrine of inner inspiration has no resemblance whatever to our subjectivism.” His true originality was his personality which imposed on an optimistic society a pessimistic world-view. It is true that the revolution was profound and yet it was not modern: ”the cla.s.sic spirit, free inst.i.tutions, democratic ideals, all these great forces by which we live are not the heritage of Luther.”

As the wave of nationalism and militarism swept over Europe with the Bismarckian wars, men began to judge the Reformation as everything else by its relation, real or fancied, to racial superiority or power. Even in Germany scholars were not at all clear as to exactly what this relation was. Paul de Lagarde idealized the Middle Ages as showing the perfect expression of German character and he detested ”the coa.r.s.e, scolding Luther, who never saw further than his two hobnailed shoes, and who by his demagogy, brought in barbarism and split Germany into fragments.” Nevertheless even he saw, at times, that the Reformation meant a triumph of nationalism, and found it significant that the Basques, who were not a nation, should have produced, in Loyola and Xavier, the two greatest champions of the anti-national church.

The tide soon started flowing the other way and scholars began to see clearly that in some sort the Reformation was a triumph of ”Deutschtum”

against the ”Romanitas” of Latin religion and culture. Treitschke, as the representative of this school, trumpeted forth that ”the Reformation arose from the good {737} German conscience,” and that, ”the Reformer of our church was the pioneer of the whole German nation on the road to a freer civilization.” The dogma that might makes right was adopted at Berlin--as Acton wrote in 1886--and the mere fact that the Reformation was successful was accounted a proof of its rightness by historians like Waitz and Kurtz.

Naturally, all was not as bad as this. A rather attractive form of the thesis was presented by Karl Sell. Whereas, he thinks, Protestantism has died, or is dying, as a religion, it still exists as a mood, as bibliolatry, as a national and political cult, as a scientific and technical motive-power, and, last but not least, as the ethos and pathos of the Germanic peoples.

[Sidenote: The Great War]

In the Great War Luther was mobilized as one of the German national a.s.sets. Professor Gustav Kawerau and many others appealed to the Reformer's writings for inspiration and justification of their cause; and the German infantry sang ”Ein' feste Burg” while marching to battle.

Even outside of Germany the war of 1870 meant, in many quarters, the defeat of the old liberalism and the rise of a new school inclined, even in America--witness Mahan--to see in armed force rather than in intellectual and moral ideas the decisive factors in history. Many scholars noticed, in this connection, the s.h.i.+ft of power from the Catholic nations, led by France, to the Protestant peoples, Germany, England and America. Some, like Acton, though impressed by it, did not draw the conclusion ably presented by a Belgian, Emile de Laveleye, that the cause of national superiority lay in Protestantism, but it doubtless had a wide influence, partly unconscious, on the verdict of history.

[Sidenote: Reaction against German ideals]

But the recoil was far greater than the first movement. Paul Sabatier wrote (in 1913) that until 1870 Protestantism had enjoyed the esteem of thoughtful {738} men on account of its good sense, domestic and civic virtues and its openness to science and literary criticism. This high opinion, strengthened by the prestige of German thought, was shattered, says our authority, by the results of the Franco-Prussian war, its train of horrors, and the consequences to the victors, who raved of their superiority and attributed to Luther the result of Sedan.

The Great War loosed the tongues of all enemies of Luther. ”Literary and philosophic Germany,” said Denys Cochin in an interview, ”prepared the evolution of the state and the cult of might. . . . The haughty and aristocratic reform of Luther both prepared and seconded the aberration.”

[Sidenote: Paquier]

Paquier has written a book around the thesis: ”Nothing in the present war would have been alien to Luther, for like all Germans of to-day, he was violent and faithless. The theory of Nietzsche is monstrous, but it is the logical conclusion of the religious revolution accomplished by Luther and of the philosophical revolution accomplished by Kant.” He finds the causal nexus between Luther and Hindenburg in two important doctrines and several corollaries. First, the doctrine of justification by faith meant the disparagement of morality and the exaltation of the end at the expense of the means. Secondly, Luther deified the state. Finally, in his narrow patriotism, Luther is thought to have inspired the reckless deeds of his posterity.

On the other hand some French Protestants, notably Weiss, have sought to show that the modern doctrines of Prussia were not due to Luther but were an apostasy from him.

Practically all the older methods of interpreting the Reformation have survived to the present; to save s.p.a.ce they must be noticed with the utmost brevity.

{739} [Sidenote: Protestants]

The Protestant scholars of the last sixty years have all, as far as they are worthy of serious notice, escaped from the crudely supernaturalistic point of view. Their temptation is now, in proportion as they are conservative, to read into the Reformation ideas of their own. Harnack [Sidenote: Harnack] sees in Luther, as he does in Christ and Paul and all other of his heroes, exactly his own German liberal Evangelical mind. He is inclined to admit that Luther was little help to the progress of science and enlightenment, that he did not absorb the cultural elements of his time nor recognize the right and duty of free research, but yet he thinks the Reformation more important than any other revolution since Paul simply because it restored the true, _i.e._ Pauline and Harnackian theology. Loisy's criticism of him is brilliant: ”What would Luther have thought had his doctrine of salvation by faith been presented to him with the amendment 'independently of beliefs,' or with this amendment, 'faith in the merciful Father, for faith in the Son is foreign to the Gospel of Jesus'?” The same treatment of Mohammedanism, as that accorded by Harnack to Christianity would, as Loisy remarks, deduce from it the same humanitarian deism as that now fas.h.i.+onable at Berlin.

I should like to speak of the work of Below and Wernle, of Bohmer and Kohler, of Fisher and Walker and McGiffert, and of many other Protestant scholars, by which I have profited. But I can only mention one other Protestant tendency, that of some liberals who find the Reformation (quite naturally) too conservative for them. Laurent wrote in this sense in 1862-70, and he was followed by one of the most thoughtful of Protestant apologists, Charles Beard. [Sidenote: Beard] Beard saw in the Reformation the subjective form of religion over against the objectivity of Catholicism, and also, ”the first great triumph of the scientific spirit”--the {740} Renaissance, in fact, applied to theology.

And yet he found its work so imperfect and even hampering at the time he wrote (1883) that the chief purpose of his book was to advocate a new Reformation to bring Christianity in complete harmony with science.

[Sidenote: Philosophers]

Several philosophers have, more from tradition than creed, adopted the Protestant standpoint. Eucken thinks that ”the Reformation became the animating soul of the modern world, the principle motive-force of its progress. . . . In truth, every phase of modern life not directly or indirectly connected with the Reformation has something insipid and paltry about it.” Windelband believes that the Reformation arose from mysticism but conquered only by the power of the state, and that the stamp of the conflict between the inner grace and the outward support is of the _esse_ of Protestanism. William James was also in warm sympathy with Luther who, he thought, ”in his immense, manly way . . . stretched the soul's imagination and saved theology from puerility.” James added that the Reformer also invented a morality, as new as romantic love in literature, founded on a religious experience of despair breaking through the old, pagan pride.

[Sidenote: Catholics]

While many Catholics, among them Maurenbrecher and Gasquet, labored fruitfully in the field of the Reformation by uncovering new facts, few or none of them had much new light to cast on the philosophy of the period. Janssen [Sidenote: Janssen] brought to its perfection a new method applied to a new field; the field was that of _Kulturgeschichte_, the method that of letting the sources speak for themselves, but naturally only those sources agreeable to the author's bias. In this way he represented the fifteenth century as the great blossoming of the German mind, and the Reformation as a blighting frost to both culture and morality. Pastor's [Sidenote: Pastor] work, though dense with fresh knowledge, offers no connected {741} theory. The Reformation, he thinks, was a shock without parallel, involving all sides of life, but chiefly the religious. It was due in Germany to a union of the learned cla.s.ses and the common people; in England to the caprice of an autocrat.