Jim’s Reviews > The Reformation > Status Update

The true subject of history, says Ibn-Kaldun, is civilization: how it arises, how it is maintained, how it develops letters, sciences, and arts, and why it decays. Empires, like individuals, have a life and trajectory which are their own. They grow, they mature, they decline.

"By idolatry," [John] Knox wrote in 1560, "we understand the Mass, invocation of saints, adoration of images, and the keeping and retaining of the same, and all honoring of God not contained in His Holy Word."

Some [churchmen] exploited the credulity—and gathered the coins—of the commons by bogus relics to which they ascribed miraculous cures; bishops complained of the "stinking boots, mucky combs ... rotten girdles ... locks of hair, and filthy rags ... set forth and commended unto the ignorant people" as authentic relics of holy men or women.

[Luther in 1525] There are nowadays almost as many sects and creeds as there are heads.

Some [Anabaptists] were racked and drawn asunder, others were burnt to ashes and dust; some were roasted on pillars or torn with red-hot pincers.... Others were hanged on trees, beheaded with the sword, or thrown into the water.... The rest were hunted from one country and place to another. Like owls and ravens, which durst not fly by day, they were often compelled to to hide and live in rocks and clefts.

[Erasmus] There are priests now in vast numbers, enormous herds of them, seculars and regulars, and it is notorious that very few of them are chaste. The great proportion fall into lust and incest and open profligacy. It would surely be better if those who cannot be continent should be allowed lawful wives of their own, and so escape this foul and miserable pollution.

From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day. (Cf. Tuesday, November 8, 2016)

Erasmus on English homes: "Almost all the floors are of clay and rushes from the marshes, so carelessly renewed that the foundation sometimes remains for twenty years, harboring, there below, spittle and vomit and wine of dogs and men, beer ... remnants of fishes, and other filth unnameable. Hence with the change of weather a vapor exhales which in my judgment is far from wholesome."

The France of 1300 was by no means the majestic realm that today reaches from the Channel to the Mediterranean, and from the Vosges and Alps to the Atlantic.