Philip Hughes: A Popular History of the Reformation

An account of the Reformation from a Catholic perspective is a rare thing, and this one is over sixty years old; for Catholics, the Reformation is usually something to regret and condemn, rather than attempt to understand. After more than forty years of not being a Catholic, however, I still find the beliefs of that Church rather more humane than those of Protestants, particularly when they write about salvation and damnation, the elect, and the doctrine of predestination: Catholics seem to place far more emphasis on the individual conscience, on humans doing their best, and on a God that would understand human weakness…

Philip Hughes wrote from a Catholic, universalist perspective; his book is not an all-encompassing tome like MacCulloch‘s. He goes for the broad-brush approach, and offers a useful sketch of the pre-Reformation world with which few non-Catholics would disagree, I think. He is strongly, though guardedly critical of the failings of the mediaeval (Catholic) Church and the abuses that went on, showing an understanding of the complexities of things, though he does seem to slip into an apologia occasionally… perhaps one has to take into account the times and circumstances in which he was writing. So, serious flaws are admitted, whilst at the same time he does put the best possible gloss on the Church’s achievements, and contrives to ignore completely the horrific deeds of the Inquisition, the massacres of the Cathars and quite a lot more.

As one might expect, he offers a sturdy, orthodox and convincing Catholic demolition of Luther‘s teachings on justification, righteousness and salvation by faith alone; he does a great job of pointing out the flaws, illogicalities and inconsistencies in the reformers, at times slipping into ridicule, which I find inappropriate and uncharitable in such a book. Sarcasm is not necessary; a more measured approach would have left reformers to condemn themselves out of their own mouths. So I was disappointed by a certain Catholic blinkeredness, overall, and could not recommend this as the only book one read on the subject.

His particular specialism is the Reformation in England, which is also the title of his major work – I must go back and re-read it – and here he is much clearer and stronger; His broad sweep shows the royal process and complete control of the Reformation in England, using the absolute power the Tudors enjoyed, and some very capable henchmen, as well as the overarching financial motivation behind the seizure of church property and the destruction of the monasteries. The hypocrisy of the jobsworths who made careers and fortunes out of doing first Henry VIII’s and then Edward’s bidding, turned tail under Mary and then again under Elizabeth – the Cromwells and Cranmers – is laid shockingly bare. Hughes voices understandable Catholic sadness over Mary’s short and horribly ill-advised reign, and then it’s all over: a highly managed and political Elizabethan settlement that has forty years to embed itself… the English Reformation wasn’t really about religion at all.

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Reformation – Europe’s House Divided

Warning: a post about religion. I do not set out to offend anyone, but recognise that my opinions may offend some. If in doubt, avoid.

The writer makes it clear from the beginning that the mediaeval Church was not in a state of terminal decay and decline. However, poor leadership, numerous scandals and much internal squabbling did seriously undermine its authority in the years leading up to 1517. He manages, despite the complexity of the task, to give a clear picture of the differing theological positions of the leading actors in the various reformations in different parts of Europe at different times.

Much centres around the issue of predestination, a topic that it is very difficult to get one’s head around: the idea that people can be damned or saved from the moment of their birth, and be unable to do anything about this, suggests that some of the reformers invented a really cruel God for their new churches. I got just a little lost trying to follow how Augustine of Hippo, echoing Paul, and his doctrine of original sin, seemed to lead reformers inevitably to predestination, but it did… along with the baggage that came along with the labelling of original sin as a sexual sin, too. To me, predestination reads like a human attempt to limit the power of God, as it were, and I’m with whoever it was – Ludwig Feuerbach, I think – who basically said that man creates God in his own image… It all does seem astonishingly arrogant, if one wants to believe in a God, to then tell him (for it is a He!) how to run his creation. There was also an astonishing amount of hair-splitting about the nature of the Eucharist, and the arguments read like a re-run of the attempts a thousand years earlier to out-manoeuvre various early heresies.

The history of the early years of the Reformation, in Wittenberg, Strasbourg, Zurich and Geneva, shows how quickly very real differences emerged between those challenging the authority and teaching of Rome; this has been a facet of Protestantism ever since. Chaos ensued and everything flew apart very rapidly. Not only did Protestant oppose Catholic, but Lutheran opposed Calvinist, and so on… until you reach the Thirty Years War, a hundred years after the start of the Reformation, and an utter cataclysm for large parts of Europe.

MacCulloch’s scope and knowledge astonishes, and I learned many new things on this, my second reading of the book. Luther approved of images, which is why so many German churches retain their glorious mediaeval painting, sculpture and carving, which was so comprehensively trashed by Henry VIII’s hooligans in this country. I learned that there were different attitudes to Purgatory in northern and southern Europe, crucial as it was the issue of indulgences – designed to allow the dead to escape Purgatory – which initially fired Luther’s anger in 1517. And then there was the issue of the difference between reading and writing, which I deal with in an earlier post (here).

There were apparently lengthy and repeated attempts over a considerable number of years to effect reconciliation between the Reformers and Rome, but eventually the Roman hard-liners defeated the conciliators in the 1540s, and then followed the Council of Trent and the entrenchment of the Counter-Reformation. The picture of Protestantism is fragmented, that of the Catholic Church monolithic, and elsewhere I read recently that what the Catholic Church offers are rigid, inviolable beliefs, pronounced with authority, to be accepted and obeyed, no questions asked, but along with that, a recognition that its stance is an ideal and recognising that humans are necessarily imperfect and fallible; nevertheless, the Church gives its believers something to aspire to, even if they don’t achieve it. Somehow – although it’s not for me – that is rather more humane than the hellfire and damnation of Protestant fundamentalism.

When he deals with the Reformation in England, MacCulloch pulls no punches, labelling it as one of the most violent in Europe, and laying out much evidence which contradicts the feeling that we like to have about ourselves and our country, that we are such a tolerant place.

MacCulloch manages to offer clear explanations to non-believers, and without patronising believers, and those who are familiar with the events and issues; there are copious helpful notes and references and an excellent bibliography. His scope is very wide, and justifiably so. This is the book on the subject, I think.

La Belle Sauvage – again…

If you think about it, the Dark Materials trilogy is a self-contained work that cannot itself be added to or extended: the events of those novels span multiple universes, made possible by the operations of Lord Asriel, and also by the use of the subtle knife, and when the novels end, the doors between the universes must all be sealed up, and the knife broken, so no further movement between worlds is possible: this is what makes the separation of Will and Lyra at the end of The Amber Spyglass so moving and painful – as well as necessary.

So, any subsequent books, including La Belle Sauvage and whatever the second and third parts of The Book of Dust is to be called, are additions: La Belle Sauvage happens in Lyra’s world, which we all know and love, but does not extend outside of it. The machinations of the Church, and Asriel, and others researching the Rusakov particle, will lead to the fantastic events of the trilogy ten years later, and the ten years after those events, the following books may be set in Will’s or Lyra’s world (or both) I imagine, but without connection between them.

What these limitations leave Philip Pullman with, it seems to me, are his ideas, which for me were always at the heart of the Dark Materials trilogy anyway: questions of innocence and experience, the notion of good and evil, original sin, and the role of God, if there is one.

The world of the Church and the Magisterium is a cruel and Calvinistic one, it seems to me, and its evil has been clarified for me by some of the reading I’ve been doing lately that has been prompted by the 500^th anniversary of Luther‘s ninety-five theses and the start of the Reformation. One of the things which came from the Reformation was a stronger emphasis on what can only be called predestination: the idea that, in religious terms, or if one accepts that particular Christian doctrine, most people are born with no hope of salvation, doomed to damnation, and the small (smug?) band of the elect, or the saved, are saved through no effort of their own. Obviously I oversimplify, but it’s a pretty cruel God that some people have invented, and one that my own Catholic upbringing makes me find repellent.

The idea that we must try to build the Republic of Heaven here and now, in the world we are actually living in, is not a new one, though Pullman has made it clear and concrete in a different way in HDM. The choice to rebel against an arbitrary power (God, if you like) was evil, wrong, Satan-prompted, in traditional Christian terms, although even Milton in his epic Paradise Lost cannot help turning Satan into some kind of hero. But Pullman emphasises that the choice to reject control, to assume power oneself, is a positive and liberating one, as well as being the one that makes us fully human; again, it’s this final point that Milton cannot avoid in his poem. So, ultimately, is this choice to be human wrong – a sin – or inevitable, given our free will, and also liberating: this is what we are, and can be?

Free will is the problem, of course, for us humans now: many can and do choose evil, make wrong choices that harm and oppress others. Predestination removes the problem: we don’t have free will if we are predestined to damnation from the moment of birth, with no hope of changing our fate through our own actions, and what follows then is that nothing that happens in this world is of any ultimate significance or consequence at all: the elect get heaven anyway, and everyone else ends up in hell…

Back to Pullman, who nails his colours clearly to the mast in HDM: the Fall was a felix culpa, but not in the traditional Christian sense: the Fall liberates us to be human. Will and Lyra made many choices, considered and with the help and advice of many wise creatures, on their epic journey. Having read and enjoyed La Belle Sauvage, but thought further some of its inevitable limitations, I now realise that it’s the next two books that I’m really waiting for: what did happen next?