The Reformation

by Will Durant

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

Most men are harassed and buffeted by life, and crave supernatural assistance when natural forces fail them; they gratefully accept faiths that give dignity and hope to their existence, and order and meaning to the world; they could hardly condone so patiently the careless brutalities of nature, the bloodshed and chicaneries of history, or their own tribulations and bereavements, if they could not trust that these are parts of an inscrutable but divine design. A cosmos without known cause or fate is an intellectual prison; we long to believe that the great drama has a just author and a noble end.

Science gives man ever greater powers but ever less significance; it improves his tools and neglects his purposes; it is silent on ultimate origins, values, and aims; it gives life and history no meaning or worth that is not canceled by death or omnivorous time.

Ashamed of failure, bereaved of those they loved, darkened with sin, and fearful of death, they feel themselves redeemed by divine aid, cleansed of guilt and terror, solaced and inspired with hope, and raised to a godlike and immortal destiny.

The Church was at her best when, by the consolations of her creed, the magic of her ritual, the nobler morality of her adherents, the courage, zeal, and integrity of her bishops, and the superior justice of her episcopal courts, she took the place vacated by the Roman Imperial government as the chief source of order and peace in the Dark Ages (approximately 524–1079 A.D.) of the Christian world.

Throughout the fourteenth century the Church suffered political humiliation and moral decay. She had begun with the profound sincerity and devotion of Peter and Paul; she had grown into a majestic system of familial, scholastic, social, international discipline, order, and morality; she was now degenerating into a vested interest absorbed in self-perpetuation and finance.

Every judgment or favor obtained from the Curia expected a gift in acknowledgment, and the judgment was sometimes dictated by the gift.

Since the Church had survived for a century without reform, but could hardly survive a week without money, he concluded that money was more urgently needed than reform.

Religion normally thrives in an agricultural regime, science in an industrial economy.

Cardinals were chosen rarely for their piety, usually for their wealth or political connections or administrative capacity; they looked upon themselves, not as monks burdened with vows, but as the senators and diplomats of a rich and powerful state; in many instances they were not priests; and they did not let their red hats impede their enjoyment of life.26 The Church forgot the poverty of the Apostles in the needs and expenses of power.

Three things, said Gower, are merciless when they get out of hand: water, fire, and the mob.

The long heyday of cavalry, which had dawned at Adrianople 968 years before, here began to fade; infantry came to the fore, and the military supremacy of the aristocracy declined.

nature and human ignorance, those resolute Malthusians, cooperated with war and famine to counteract the reproductive ecstasies of mankind.

Grenoble built a Palais de Justice in 1505, Rouen a still more resplendent one in 1493; Robert Ango and Rolland Leroux designed it in ornate Gothic, the nineteenth century redecorated it, the second World War gutted it.

Since love marriages were exceptional, and divorce was forbidden, adultery was popular, especially in the aristocracy.

Beer and ale were the national drinks; wine was not as plentiful or popular as in France or Italy, but a gallon of beer per day was the usual allowance per person, even for nuns. The English, said Sir John Fortescue (c. 1470), “drink no water, unless at certain times upon religious score, or by way of doing penance.”

Perhaps we judge the age too harshly, forgetting the barbarities of our enlightened century.

Sir Thomas More, at the outset of the sixteenth century, reckoned that some 40 per cent of the English people could read.

In Scandinavia man’s prime task was to conquer the cold, in Holland the sea, in Germany the forests, in Austria the mountains; agriculture, the ground of life, hung its fate on these victories.

Order is the mother of civilization and liberty; chaos is the midwife of dictatorship; therefore history may now and then say a good word for kings.

In the progressive weakening of faith and the papacy men were beginning to think of themselves as patriots first and Christians afterward. Catholicism, which is supernational, declined; nationalism, which is Protestant, rose.

The Church looked with some concern upon mystics who ignored most of her dogmas, neglected her ritual, and claimed to reach God without the help of priests or sacraments. Here lay in germ the Reformation doctrines of private judgment, and every man a priest, and justification not by good works but by transcendent faith.

The Church held that supernatural revelations could come from demons and maniacs as well as from God and the saints, and that some authoritative guidance was needed to keep religion from disintegrating into a chaos of individual visions and theologies. That difference of view still divides honest men.

What put an end to the Middle Ages? Many causes, operating through three centuries: the failure of the Crusades; the spreading acquaintance of renascent Europe with Islam; the disillusioning capture of Constantinople; the resurrection of classic pagan culture; the expansion of commerce through the voyages of Henry the Navigator’s fleet, and Columbus, and Vasco da Gama; the rise of the business class, which financed the centralization of monarchical government; the development of national states challenging the supernational authority of the popes; the successful revolt of Luther against the papacy; printing.

Of the once numerous middle class only a fringe remained. Above it were luxurious nobles and prelates gorgeously garbed, who had learned nothing from history and had forgotten everything but their privileges.

No other government ever so fully deserved to fall as the Byzantine. Having lost the will to defend itself, and unable to persuade the too sophisticated Greeks that it is sweet and noble to die for one’s country, it sent no contingent to the Christian armies at the Maritsa, Kosovo, or Nicopolis.

When Venetians hunted and massacred Greek Catholics in Crete for refusing to accept the Roman ritual and papal supremacy, Pope Urban V joined Petrarch in congratulating the doge on his firm protection of the one true Church (c. 1350).

some preferred to submit to the Moslems, who taxed no more than the Christian rulers, persecuted heresy less or not at all,11 and allowed four wives.

The fate of Christianity and monogamy teetered in the scales.

From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.

Nuno Tristão sailed down to Capo Blanco, and brought home some sturdy Negroes, who were at once baptised and enslaved; feudal barons put them to work on Portuguese plantations, and the first major result of Henry’s labors was the inauguration of the African slave trade.

Slowly the Italian Renaissance, mortally stricken by Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and Luther in one generation, faded away, while Portugal and Spain, commanders of the open sea, led the flowering of the Atlantic states.

Manners were grave and perfect, much better than hygiene; every Spaniard was a gentleman, but few were knights of the bath.

Venus triumphed over all, and the fertility of women outran the bounty of the soil.

Our present intolerance is rather for those who question our economic or political principles, and we explain our frightened dogmatism on the ground that any doubt thrown upon these cherished assumptions endangers our national solidarity and survival.

Both the Inquisition and the witch-burning were expressions of an age afflicted with homicidal certainty in theology, as the patriotic massacres of our era may be due in part to homicidal certainty in ethnic or political theory.

A supreme and unchallengeable faith is a deadly enemy to the human mind.

Spain lost an incalculable treasure by the exodus of Jewish and Moslem merchants, craftsmen, scholars, physicians, and scientists, and the nations that received them benefited economically and intellectually. Knowing henceforth only one religion, the Spanish people submitted completely to their clergy, and surrendered all right to think except within the limits of the traditional faith. For good or ill, Spain chose to remain medieval, while Europe, by the commercial, typographical, intellectual, and Protestant revolutions, rushed into modernity.

All through the fifteenth century stone rose upon stone until Seville had raised the largest Gothic edifice in the world,* so that, said Théophile Gautier, “Notre Dame de Paris might walk erect in the nave.”57 However, Notre Dame is perfect; Seville Cathedral is vast. Sixty-seven sculptors and thirty-eight painters from Murillo to Goya toiled to adorn this mammoth cave of the gods.

It is a comfort to know that their love was triumphantly consummated, after tribulations as numerous before marriage in fiction as after it in life.

the Middle Ages—which we may loosely define as the life of Europe between Constantine and Columbus, 325 to 1492 A.D.

the name V audois given them, as generally to heretics (Waldenses) and witches in France, survived an Atlantic voyage to generate the word Voodooism

Literacy had been a costly luxury in an agricultural regime; it was a necessity in an urban commercial world.

By the end of the fifteenth century watches were numerous, some as large as a hand, some as small as an almond,

Italy had by 1300 barely regained the medical knowledge reached by Galen and Soranus a thousand years before.

We must distinguish (as Averroës and Duns Scotus had advised) between theological truth and philosophical truth, and humbly accept in faith what proud reason doubts.

Many theologians accepted his view that the basic tenets of the Christian religion could not be proved by reason;72 and the distinction between philosophical truth and religious truth was as widely spread in the fourteenth century as is today the tacit truce between scientific inquiry and religious ministrations.

Seizing the opportunity presented by the deterioration of the Church’s international and intellectual authority, the secular rulers now dreamed of mastering every phase of life in their realms, including religion and the Church. This was the basic issue that would be fought out in the Reformation; and the triumph of the state over the Church would mark one terminus of the Middle Ages.

The whole human race, we are reminded, owes its existence to folly, for what is so absurd as the male’s polymorphous pursuit of the female, his feverish idealization of her flesh, his goatish passion for copulation? What man in his senses would pay for such detumescence with the lifelong bondage of monogamy? What woman in her senses would pay for it with the pains and tribulations of motherhood? Is it not ridiculous that humanity should be the accidental by-product of this mutual attrition? If men and women paused to reason, all would be lost.

The northward movement of German money and trade divorced northern Germany from the Italian economy, and made it strong enough to protect Luther from emperor and pope. South Germany, perhaps for opposite reasons, remained Catholic.