R EFORMATION
IMAGINING CHANGE
Between 1517 and 1525 Martin Luther and the reformers associated with him achieved something truly extraordinary, a new spirituality articu-lated through an altogether new religious vocabulary. The ‘‘priesthood of all believers’’ undercut more than a thousand years of ecclesiastical de-velopment. During the course of those centuries the clergy had success-fully abstracted itself from medieval Latin society in order to dominate that society—and thereby created what they believed to be the true Christian world. Now the reformers had radically reimagined both. At a stroke the clergy had become the creatures of the community, in a real sense public servants. Moreover, the claim that salvation could be achieved by faith alone subverted the sacramental system, the founda-tion of clerical power and the flashpoint for dispute about priestly authority. But faith in what? Where, without clergy, could anyone per-ceive religious truth? Supernatural truth could only come from beyond nature itself, directly from the deity—God’s specific statements made in scripture. By reading or hearing the text, anyone—literally anyone—
could grasp the fundamentals of Christianity, and notably the Nazarene’s redemptive mission. By having faith in that mission, salvation would occur as an act of grace.
By faith alone, by scripture alone, by grace alone, this unbending in-sistence on direct personal contact with the divine overturned the logic of religion. Authority now oscillated from radical individualism—
with subsequent reformers generating highly developed preoccupations with both internal and external ‘‘discipline’’—to a no less radical
preoccupation with society and civic responsibility. Religious services for the Protestant could only take place in public, and community coer-cion supplanted clerical coercoer-cion as the central instrument of social control.
Here indeed was revolution. Here was also an enormous epistemo-logical problem: why in the world was there the medieval church at all? If the church at Rome embodied false Christianity, indeed anti-Christianity, then how did this come about? How could something so profoundly wrong possess such complete power and authority? Any radical reformer, any revolutionary—at any time—needs to address just this question. It has never been an easy question to answer.
And if that were not enough, the question came with a corollary.
Why was now the time to set it right? and who appointed you, the would-be reformer, to do so? How could so many previous generations of intelligent people be so blind, so misled? The great conservative, Catholic charge—where was your church before Luther?—does not even need to be posed. The very circumstance of reform requires the reformer to answer this question to himself. The Catholic canard, however long-lived, polemically effective, and rhetorically important within the sixteenth-century upheaval, is ultimately irrelevant.
Today, modern people all but instinctively respond to such questions with secular historical analysis and the powerful insight of social science.
But no such intellectual tools were available to the sixteenth century.
Quite the contrary, the reformers would lay the foundations from which such categories of analysis eventually arose. For early modern people the problem was gigantic. Change required a vocabulary of development, history, and time. It demanded ways of imagining qualitative change.
Yet, as we have seen in chapter 1, the mainstream medieval world offered intellectual structures that were altogether unsatisfactory to this purpose. The dominant ways of thought spoke within two allied voices.
On the one hand there existed an organic tradition, a form of natural-ism variously labeled but famously known as the Great Chain of Being.
Concerned with the manipulation of timeless categories, it undertook deductions from universal propositions. Universal propositions, how-ever, could only generate still further universal propositions. They offered no insight into particular circumstances, no mechanism for conceiving of change or process. Only an angelic intellect might intuit
particulars from universals. Only angels, the medieval successors to Plato’s imaginary philosopher king, might perceive the individual within the general. The human mind simply could not do it. The syl-logism neatly illustrates the point. Major premise: Socrates is a man.
Minor premise: all men are mortal. The conclusion tells what Socrates shares or might share with other men, but it tells us nothing whatever about what distinguishes Socrates from other individuals. It can tell us nothing of Socrates’ uniqueness, nothing about his particular character, or, most important, nothing about his moment—his moment in time.
No matter how skillful the logician, no matter how determined the thinker, no matter how subtle the reasoning, universals could never get beyond universals. And all such categories were inherently time-less. The medieval ratio provided a deeply atemporal set of analytical techniques and offered no insight into history.
Again as we have seen in the previous chapter, even when medieval people needed to speak of the individual, the particular, the context, they still did so in ways that were also effectively timeless. They talked of tradition, custom, ancient usage—procedures, directives, and charac-teristics that had existed ‘‘time out of mind.’’ When, between 1468 and 1471, England’s lord chief justice Sir John Fortescue described the realm, he spoke of its customs and of their vast antiquity. England’s out-standing feature was that, despite all the political changes that had taken place over the centuries, nothing had really changed. All sorts of people had ruled the kingdom of England at one time or another: Brit-ons, SaxBrit-ons, Romans, Danes, and now Normans. Yet throughout this vast stretch of time, ‘‘the realm has been continuously ruled by the same customs as it is now, customs which, if they had not been the best, some of those kings would have changed for the sake or justice or by the impulse of caprice, and totally abolished them.’’ But English law worked so well that no ruler did, not even the Romans. That law was conse-quently the oldest and most continuous in Europe. ‘‘Hence there is no gainsaying nor legitimate doubt but that the customs of the English are not only good but the best.’’1England’s law was the ‘‘best’’ in the sense that it best fit the particular context that comprised the English king-dom. Other legal systems did not serve their environments as compe-tently or effectively as did England’s because they lacked comparable antiquity. They were not as ‘‘immemorial.’’ They could not therefore
39 Apocalypse Revived
possess comparable ‘‘wisdom.’’ The ancient medieval maxim described it succinctly: old law is good law, and the good old law is valid as new law is not.
Of course things did change, as Fortescue and everyone else knew full well, but what impressed medieval people was the underlying structure, ultimately rooted in nature, that withstood change. Both logic and tradi-tion were timeless, and that precise quality made the world ratradi-tional and amenable to human cognition. Change was just the opposite and found its symbol in Lady Fortune’s wheel. Kings and kingdoms were lifted up and cast down, but the archetypes of kingship, social hierarchy, and authority remained unaltered. Change, transience, decay, and mutation all obtained in the world below the moon. But they did not feature within the regular workings of the pristine, changeless heavens (see Figure 2.1). Rather, they were the measure of irrationality, the conse-quence of the fall of man—at once both painful and yet meaningless.
For medieval people the wheel of fortune became their emblem of the absurd.
The entire weight of the medieval world thus bore heavily against any idea of meaningful, qualitative change. To envision that this day might be one way, but that tomorrow would be or should be radically different—or that things had once been right, but were now just the oppo-site and utterly wrong—required an act of deeply religious imagination.
It required the spirituality of the apocalypse. Prophecy alone allowed this possibility in the pre-modern age. The prophets, the patriarchs, and the apostles had spoken of corruption and crisis at the end of days. Daniel in particular had seen a succession of kingdoms before justice and right-eousness triumphed. Paul had warned of a false Christianity before the return of the Nazarene. Peter’s letters had spoken frequently of the Anti-christ, indeed of the Antichrists, that lay in the future. John of Patmos had outlined figuratively what appeared to be the narrative of the entire Christian experience, which simply brimmed with images of transforma-tion, retributransforma-tion, and justice. Surely if this vast array of prophetic sym-bols and pregnant promises possessed any meaning at all, it described the spiritual crisis of the sixteenth century and the rise of reform in the latter days. The apocalypse, eschatology, and prophecy became ever more important ideas for Luther and the early reformers and then a cen-tral theme within the Reformation. The apocalypse made the world intelligible.
Figure 2.1 Robert Recorde’s The Castle of Knowledge (London, 1556) is the first English explication of Copernicus’s new astronomy. The frontispiece illustrates the empire of fortune and its limits. To the left Lady Reason with dividers in hand charts the heavenly sphere. There lies the realm of certainty and stability, where motion can be calculated and the future projected.
Accordingly, Reason stands in her shoes, her feet firmly planted upon a pillar, clear-eyed and wise. To the right Lady Fortune turns her wheel of instability while precariously standing barefoot on a ball. Blindfolded, and with her clothing in disarray, she rules a world transience, aimless change, mutability, contingency, and ignorance—a world without meaning or intelligibility. The verses in the lower cartouche indicate that Lady Fortune’s empire does not extend beyond the sublunar realm, even within a Copernican universe.
As early as the summer of 1520 Luther had come to see the medie-val church and its clerical defenders as a cruel inversion of the Chris-tian faith, the anti-ChrisChris-tianity of prophecy. ‘‘Well may we fear that Antichrist has been at work, or is completing his preparations.’’ The reformers confronted nothing less than ‘‘the community of Antichrist and the devil.’’ The extravagant claims made for papal authority
‘‘surely is the work of Antichrist himself.’’ Like a great many people, including even those who rejected his reform, Luther had no doubt that he was living ‘‘in these latter days of evil.’’2 His reform, along with his prophetic understanding of its significance, proved explosive throughout Europe. Within a decade his major works saw translation into languages across the continent. The new spirituality reached in all directions and to all levels of society. By 1525 the peasants of Swa-bia took up arms in the name of reform both religious and social, and, also from Luther, they adopted the language of Antichrist. If, like nearly all European elites, Luther continued to believe in the Great Chain of Being and social hierarchy, which he saw as still obtaining within the realm of nature, he actually had more in common with the radicals than he found comfortable. Both sides agreed that there had been a great falling away since the days of the apostles and the early church. Prophecy had unfolded as a false church supplanted the true one. If Luther rejected the peasants’ demands, it was in part because the world neared its end, and the propagation of the gospel within the time remaining could hardly proceed within a context of class conflict.
An admonition to peace rather than to social justice, however con-ceived, met the urgent need of this decisive moment.
Luther’s combination of theological radicalism with social conserva-tism made his thought vastly significant, reaching well beyond any social reform that might be derived from it, and well beyond its impact on the peasants who appealed to him. Now for the first time in more than a millennium, apocalyptic expectations reached into the European mainstream intellectually, socially, culturally. Not since the Intertestamental period had this line of thinking commanded such widespread adherence. No longer the property of marginalized intellec-tuals like the spiritual Franciscans, or the ideology of the occasional community like Savonarolan Florence, or even the prism for moments of dynastic pretension, apocalyptic expectations now acquired an altogether new status. They had become integral within Western
intellectual and political life. Nearly the whole of Europe was aflame with the claims of reform, and reform inherently entailed the apoca-lypse. The apocalypse now so defined the world that, although it might be refuted or reread, it could never be dismissed or ignored. It was a matter of intense dispute in the sixteenth century whether the Protestant reform would recover a lost church and, for some, a lost civilization as well. But on one point the reformers’s claims were unas-sailable: like their apostolic predecessors, the reformers looked to an imminent end, the return of the master, the triumph of righteousness.
In this respect, if none other, the Reformation linked with antiquity in ways quite unlike the Middle Ages.
Yet something else happened that was largely without precedent.
Medieval men had hesitated to call even their bitterest enemies the Antichrist, but when they did they almost invariably named individu-als: Saladin, Frederick II, Pope John XXII (an Avignon pope with the dubious distinction of being judged most often the historic Antichrist).
Even Joachim of Fiore, the most original of the medieval apocalyptic thinkers, and probably the medieval thinker with deepest sense of time and change, still saw the Antichrist as an individual. Small wonder that the Middle Ages witnessed the development of a luxuriant under-growth of legend about the life and deeds of Antichrist. Even when they identified groups of heretics or spoke of the Turkish menace, the target was imagined as an individual leader or a particular sultan. By contrast Luther and the sixteenth-century reformers saw the Antichrist as the institution that was the papacy and the medieval church—its doctrines, its ceremonies, its spirituality. The reformers thus undertook a project of greater complexity, with wider intellectual sophistication, and with a deeper preoccupation with time.
We can see this transition throughout Europe, even in far-off Scot-land. When the Scots theologian John Ireland spoke of Antichrist in 1490 or when the Scots poet William Dunbar did so about a decade later, in typical medieval fashion they both meant an individual. The term bore no political implications; there was nothing even remotely imminent about it. By 1550 all that had changed. We encounter a new landscape when the earl of Glencairn in 1539 denounced the Catholic clergy as ‘‘monsters with the Beast’s marke.’’ In 1550 John Knox outlined the apocalyptic programmatic underlying human experience in what would be his most remembered sermon. The 1559–1560
43 Apocalypse Revived
revolution that overthrew papal authority ensured that the new histori-cal vision reached deeply into Scottish culture. By 1570 the apohistori-calypse had established itself as a commonplace in popular political literature.
By 1580–1581 Scottish Catholics, looking to the prospect of a counter-revolution against the Protestant government, felt the need to invert the claims of the Protestant apocalyptic—even if they could not de-velop an alternative analysis of the past. The Antichrist had emerged at Geneva (not at the Vatican). By the 1590s Calvinist merchants in Edinburgh decorated their homes with murals that offered complex and highly politicized readings of the apocalyptic struggle in which they saw themselves.3 The apocalypse had now become immediate, urgent, and omnipresent, for it brought a changing world into focus.
But something else followed on the reformed understanding of Anti-christ, which had no precedent whatever. By the early 1530s Philipp Melanchthon, Joachim Camerarius, and other humanist scholars asso-ciated with Luther began to develop a historical vision of the rise of Antichrist as an institution. Working with Johannes Carion’s Chronica, initially a highly regarded chronicle of European events in traditional medieval form, the Lutheran humanists constructed an account of the Middle Ages as a step-by-step historical process. The European past had ceased to be simply one event after another, but instead acquired a central organizing principle. The story of Europe now possessed direction and meaning well beyond anything previously imagined.
Quite literally, it was going somewhere. Now people wanted know when and how papal claims arose and were made successful. They wanted to know when and how the false doctrines—transubstantiation, the intercession of saints, purgatory, indulgences, and so on—had actually emerged and become persuasive. What had caused this great
‘‘falling away,’’ as Paul had called it? When and why did the princes of the earth ultimately succumb and give over to these gross pretensions and fabrications? The rise of the Hildebrandine popes became a central element in the prophetic story, no less than did the royal and heretical resistance to them. The records of the past suddenly assumed crucial importance. Episcopal registers, court records, political papers, charters, grants, chronicles, documents of all sorts and archives of every des-cription, all acquired a significance and urgency that they had never previously possessed. Institutional records became important to the six-teenth century no longer simply to establish title, document a right, or
confirm procedure and precedence, but now also to identify historical development. Documents lay the foundation for understanding not merely current issues, but human purpose. The story of the West had become a linear process, a great sacred drama. Europe’s first historicism was born.
History and prophecy were one. Luther found himself amazed and delighted at this discovery. ‘‘Though I was not at first historically well informed, I attacked the papacy on the basis of holy Scripture. Now I rejoice heartily to see that others have attacked it from another source, that is, from history.’’ ‘‘What I have learned and taught from Paul and Daniel, namely, that the Pope is Antichrist, that history pro-claims, pointing and indicating the very man himself.’’ At precisely this juncture Luther, his associates, and virtually all reformers began to correlate prophetic symbols from scripture with the course of the medieval past—politically, spiritually, legally, and even culturally. The great reformer could only applaud ‘‘this art and new language.’’4
The new sacred history—that is, institutional history—spread rap-idly and became one of the intellectual staples of the Reformation.
Such writers as Matthias Flacius Illyricus and his associates with the Magdeburg Centuries in Germany, to Francis Lambert and Jean Cres-pin in France, to John Bale and John Foxe in England, developed a new, purposeful, and increasingly articulated vision of the past. It is no accident that separate chairs of history were established at a num-ber of Lutheran universities during the 1540s and 1550s, something
Such writers as Matthias Flacius Illyricus and his associates with the Magdeburg Centuries in Germany, to Francis Lambert and Jean Cres-pin in France, to John Bale and John Foxe in England, developed a new, purposeful, and increasingly articulated vision of the past. It is no accident that separate chairs of history were established at a num-ber of Lutheran universities during the 1540s and 1550s, something