Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

Maybe the quickest way to summarize my understanding of the Reformation, now that I’ve finished MacCulloch’s book, is like so: “Christians took some time off from killing Jews and Muslims to kill each other. Eventually the descendants of the original mother Church numbered like grains of sand, all mutually loathing one another. After exhausting themselves with murder, culminating in the Thirty Years’ War, some of those descendants decided that it would be better to figure out how to get along with one another. And lo, Toleration was born.”

The somewhat longer story is that the Ottoman Empire was encroaching on Europe’s southern and eastern borders, and actually took over enough land — Granada, for instance — to scare the daylights out of Christians. Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and others took this opportunity — quite coincidentally, it seems — to fume about the Church’s corruption. The laity saw the Ottomans’ invasion as a warning sign that the last days were coming, and that the Church would have to atone for its sins. This combined with, it seems, increasing literacy and the birth of the printing press to make access to the Bible easier. Hence people could turn to their Scripture, see that doctrine wasn’t always as their priests insisted it was, and maybe even occasionally compare one Church father to another. Origen, for instance, stands uncomfortably beside Augustine. So we begin the sola scriptura movement, justification by faith alone, and a move away from centralized Church hierarchy.

The Church didn’t take this laying down, of course, so they fought back on multiple fronts and eventually reclaimed most of Europe as Catholic territory. Spain never needed this “Counter-Reformation,” as it happens, because Spain never succumbed to the Reformation itself. Spain had already had an Inquisition directed by the infamous Tomás de Torquemada, so it had already weeded out internal resistance. The Church of the eastern tradition, which we today label Greek and Russian Orthodox, never had a Reformation, because it had already been overrun completely by the Ottomans.

Once the gates to questioning were open, people ran off in every conceivable direction from what the Bible said. The Bible actually says nothing about infant baptism, so the Anabaptists (literally rebaptists) picked up on that and insisted on adult baptism. The Bible left it questionable, at the very least, whether Mary was actually a virgin (the Bible apparently said Jesus had brothers — I did not know this), so various people questioned her holiness. There were debates over what seem nowadays like obscure, needless theological disputes, such as whether the physical substance of the wafer is everywhere in the world that people happen to be eating it — whether Christ’s body, that is, magically transports itself into each worshipper’s mouth. This is known as the doctrine of “real presence.” People seem to have died over it. MacCulloch doesn’t convincingly explain for non-believers how a small-scale doctrinal issue translates into large-scale murder.

There’s a fascinating and no doubt endlessly depressing sociological study just waiting to leap out of real presence. Here’s a provisional hypothesis: people often fight with each other more when they agree than when they don’t. I wonder whether more blood has been spilt amongst Christians than between Christians and Muslims.

Somehow Europe changed from millennia under a single church to viewing that same church’s leader, the Pope, as the Antichrist. I would like to explain how this happened, but I don’t really understand it — and unfortunately, I don’t think MacCulloch’s book is the place to go to explain that arc. He covers more or less all of Europe from the late 15th to the early 18th centuries, jumping around from country to country at will. It’s hard to pick out a “moral of the story,” and in fact I think MacCulloch eschews such a moral. He appears to be of the historical school that takes Big Lessons as insults; there’s something to be said for this, if you’d prefer not to see your histories make straightforward what is in fact complicated, contingent, and random. From this reader’s perspective, anyway, MacCulloch’s style is more distracting than helpful. His book would probably work better as a reference — grab it off the shelf and find something relevant to your particular area of interest — than it does as a straight-through narrative.

The theology in MacCulloch’s book is slight — really only enough to put a bit of context around these disputes. Yet the theological questions seem fatal. As I think Augustine was the first to point out: if god is omniscient, then he knows how our lives will play out. If he knows how our lives will play out, then it takes an act of great sophistry to claim that we have free will in any meaningful sense. Predestination might also make you ask what the purpose of prayer is; hasn’t god already made up his mind? If you’re Aquinas, you’re going to argue that god is perfect, therefore unchanging, therefore not in the business of making decisions; his mind was made up long ago. Indeed, this perfect god spends his time contemplating himself. (I honestly forget how Aquinas justifies prayer, under this light.)

Some scholars of the Reformation, most notably Calvin, took this predestination to heart. Here’s where the logic of predestination runs into politics. Time and again throughout MacCulloch’s book, theologians pull their worshippers back from the brink just before those worshippers realize where the logic of their religion is leading them. If all that matters is faith, for instance, and if all the truth one needs is available in books that any of us can read, then self-appointed leaders have much less of a role to fill. This wouldn’t work at all, of course. At the very least, it wouldn’t help the religion to fit well into civil society: political leaders need their people to stay in line.

The unkind view of this reality is that theology is so much chin music to support a preconceived conclusion. The more charitable take is that society as a whole takes time to understand the consequences of its own beliefs — much like Copernicus, who died without really understanding what he had wrought; it took Galileo and Newton to push the revolution to its logical end. (Newton, by the way, spent as much time writing about Christian mysticism as he did about the inverse-square law; so MacCulloch tells us.)

No matter how logical all these conclusions might be, the logic still has to start from axioms. If you’re a Christian, those axioms will almost certainly contain something about God’s role in the universe or Christ’s perfection. If you are a non-believer, these axioms need arguing. I’ve not yet found a book on the subject of Christianity that argues in a manner calculated to convince rational, educated nonbelivers. Supposedly Aquinas went as far as anyone to reduce Christianity to a tiny core surrounded by an impenetrable wall of logic, but the core is still unbelievable if you’ve not already bought into some contentions about Christ. I haven’t, so much of the theological debate — over, again, issues such as whether Christ is literally in the wafer — look irremediably silly to me.

The most interesting part of this book, to me, is what happened at the end of centuries of religious murder: societies dipped their toes in the water of “toleration” — i.e., “not killing other people because they think of god differently than you do.” This is what liberal democracy is: it’s the realization that since we’re all going to have to live together, we all need to give up a little something to make it work. Even getting this off the ground is very tricky: if Catholics believe that they will always be in the majority, why should they believe that they need to relent at all in their pursuit of religious monopoly? Here’s where some studies comparing the spread of religious toleration in homogeneous societies to heterogeneous ones would be valuable; for his part, MacCulloch notes that the United States was one of the first places where toleration took off, and was also the destination for immigrants from all over Europe. (Martha Nussbaum published a book recently subtitled “In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality”, which I just couldn’t get into.)

Like Borge’s infinite library, there probably lies within The Reformation the answer to every secret, and the disproof of every answer to every secret. I’d have liked a shorter volume with more clear story arcs — more analysis and less data. With that said, this is probably the sort of book that one returns to over the years, finding bits of goodness each time.