The Unintended English Reformation

Norman Jones published this great study in 2002: The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation. From the back cover:

Recent debate over the English Reformation has turned around how Catholic the nation was before the Reformation. Most scholars now believe that there was little popular support for the change in religion imposed by Henry VIII. And yet, by the end of Elizabeth's reign England was clearly Protestant. It had abandoned much of its late Medieval culture and replaced it with a new formulation. This book explores how the English, over three generations, adapted to the religious changes and, in the process, radically reconstructed their culture.

Using case studies, the author explores how individuals and the institutions in which they lived and worked, such as families, universities, towns, guilds, and Inns of Court, refashioned themselves in the face of the rapid social, ideological, political, and economic changes loosed by the Reformation. Tracing these responses across three generations, the author emphasizes the way generational interaction and self-interest interrelated to adapt to new circumstances, creating, by the late sixteenth century, a multi-theological culture that exalted nationalism and valued the individual conscience.

List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
1. Post Reformation Culture
2. Choosing Reformations
3. Families and Reformations
4. Dissolutions and Opportunities
5. Redefining Communities
6. Reinventing Public Virtue
7. Learning Private Virtue
8. The Post - Reformation World View
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

This is a fascinating study indeed which demonstrates that the unintended consequences of the English Reformation were: division and anarchy; loss of respect for authority; violence and hatred; loss of community; loss of shared virtues and consensus about behavior; greater secularization; more emphasis on individual conscience and self-interest--and an entirely changed worldview.

The English Reformation set the individual conscience completely adrift from authority outside the self, since even the individual's understanding of what Holy Scripture guided him or her to do relied entirely on his or her interpretation of what Holy Scripture guided him or her to do. The Scriptural admonitions for children to obey their parents and wives to submit to their husbands required some very fancy exigesis when the son or wife wanted to be a Protestant and the father or husband directed them to remain true to the Catholic Church--but not so much if the situation was reversed!

The dissolution of the monasteries and the chantries, the official changes in religion that effected the guilds, colleges, and other associations, all led to the abrogation of wills and bequests, and again, an increased secularization. Organizations like guilds and colleges that had had religion, prayer for the dead founders and benefactors, celebrations and services, Mass and vespers as an integral part of their organization stripped all of that away. They became mostly secular, with an annual sermon on their foundation anniversary (which had been their patron saint's feast day) and then not even that.

In each chapter as Jones looks at the changes that occurred in families, institutions and society through the state-sponsored creation of the via media, with the imposition of uniformity and the Book of Common Prayer, two issues are paramount: individual conscience (what Blessed John Henry Newman would later call "the right of self-will") and self-interest, making the individual. The entire Catholic structure of what later popes would call the Mystical Body of Christ--but which did exist in practice before the English Reformation, was dismantled. As he notes, "When conscience became the measure, it left people confused, willing to grant that individual virtue could only be determined by each individual unless it resulted in actions that damaged secular interests. . . . For many, this meant license, and for some it meant that they had to become more and more shrill in their attempts to drown out competing consciences. The little God sitting inside us, conscience, that was expected to be an infallible guide to God's will, turned out to be a Trojan horse." (p. 195)

In the chapter on "Reinventing Public Virtue", for example, Jones studies how usury, which had been condemned by the Catholic Church and by civic and canon law before the Reformation, was gradually accepted (although regulated) by the only law left, civic law. This "community sin" was taken out of English law, while local sheriffs and officials went after individuals who used blasphemous language. Queen Elizabeth I was never charged, but she certainly violated those laws against blasphemous language, as she often swore "by the mass, by God, by Christ and by many parts of Christ's body, and by saints, faith, troth, and other things. In 1585 William Fuller dared to tell the Queen that her swearing was an evil example to her subjects, encouraging adultery." (p. 167). As Jones notes, she probably replied, "by God's teeth I will not!" stop swearing.

In the final chapter, Jones summarizes this argument by presenting us with two men in contrast: from before the English Reformation, Sir Thomas More; from after the English Reformation, Sir Francis Bacon. As he notes, "they belonged to different mental worlds. They had different conceptions of the self, different ideas of a person's place and duties, different perceptions of how salvation worked, different economic values, and different political values."

In some ways, Norman Jones seems to have anticipated what Brad Gregory would examine in his 2012 study, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Norman Jones is no apologist for the world view before the English Reformation, as Gregory is for the Catholic world view in Europe before the Reformation. Gregory calls for reform in his study, but Jones is just presenting an excellent overview of social and cultural change. In a way, reading his book reminded me of Eric Ive's The Reformation Experience: Life in the Turbulent 16th Century; it seems to me that Jones succeeded where Ives failed to describe how people reacted and experienced the Reformation in England; using case studies and describing individual lives, Jones demonstrates the tremendous forces of change in the sixteenth century.

From Conference to Collected Essays

In October of 2010, Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois held a conference titled "Reforming the Reformation". Augustana College is a Lutheran, liberal arts college. The conference description:

Augustana will host the conference "Reforming Reformation" on October 17-19, 2010, organized by Thomas F. Mayer (History). The object is to undertake a fundamental rethinking of all the possible meanings of the term reformation, concept and label. In order to stimulate such thought, the conferees will be divided into four vaguely "national" panels, emphasizing places that either did not have a "real" reformation or had an odd one. This will serve to put in perspective what far too many people still count as the only true reformation, the Protestant one especially in its Lutheran and Calvinist guises. Those four panels will treat Italy, England (emphasizing the Marian interlude since it has almost always been considered a bump on the way to seeing God's will done), the Empire and Spain. Needless to say, the conference will be strongly interdisciplinary, with participants from literature, art history, theology and history.

The conference will be spent mainly in discussion, rather than sitting through papers one after another. Participants will submit their talks at least a month in advance and they will then be circulated to all and sundry. They will also be posted on the Web in such a way that folk at Augustana can get access to them. Sessions will consist of ten-minute summaries followed by discussion and audience interventions. We want to involve students and members of the community as much as possible. The sessions will mix papers up geographically to see what extra comparative sparks that can strike. The conference will open with a plenary session on Sunday evening, mainly to introduce the participants and the themes. The working sessions will be spread through the day on Monday (various history faculty have generously given up their rooms and periods) before we end with one more plenary session, probably at 8:30 on Tuesday morning.

The participants have been urged to think as much as possible about big questions and broader implications. The final versions of their papers will go into a volume to be edited by Mayer and published in his series, "Catholic Christendom, 1300-1700," which will also include a ruminative essay based on the discussions.

List of participants

I. Italy
Daniel Bornstein (history), Washington University
Marcia Hall (art history), Temple University
Abigail Brundin (literature), St Catherine's College, University of Cambridge

II. England
Peter Marshall (history), University of Warwick, England
Anne Overell (history), The Open University, Leeds, England

III. The Empire
John Frymire (history), University of Missouri
Brad Gregory (history), University of Notre Dame Ronald Thiemann (theology), Harvard Divinity School

IV. Spain
LuAnn Homza (history), College of William and Mary
John Edwards (history), Queen's College, University of Oxford Jodi Bilnikoff (history), UNC­-Greensboro

Sponsored by the Office of the President, the Institute for Leadership and Service and the Center for the Study of the Christian Millennium, with the support of the Humanities Fund and the Department of History

The result of this conference was indeed a book from Ashgate, which publishes some of the most interesting books at the highest prices imaginable, especially in their Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700 series. The book has the same title as the conference, and Ashgate describes it thus:

The Reformation used to be singular: a unique event that happened within a tidily circumscribed period of time, in a tightly constrained area and largely because of a single individual. Few students of early modern Europe would now accept this view. Offering a broad overview of current scholarly thinking, this collection undertakes a fundamental rethinking of the many and varied meanings of the term concept and label 'reformation', particularly with regard to the Catholic Church.

Accepting the idea of the Reformation as a process or set of processes that cropped up just about anywhere Europeans might be found, the volume explores the consequences of this through an interdisciplinary approach, with contributions from literature, art history, theology and history. By examining a single topic from multiple interdisciplinary perspectives, the volume avoids inadvertently reinforcing disciplinary logic, a common result of the way knowledge has been institutionalized and compartmentalized in research universities over the last century.

The result of this is a much more nuanced view of Catholic Reformation, and once that extends consideration much further - both chronologically, geographically and politically - than is often accepted. As such the volume will prove essential reading to anyone interested in early modern religious history.

Ashgate provides a sample from the book, the Introduction by Thomas Mayer, and Augustana provides as least two of the presentations on-line, by Peter Marshall and by Brad S. Gregory.

Archbishop Chaput on Gregory's Unintended Reformation

Writing for The Witherspoon Institute, Archbishop Charles Chaput reviews a book about the Protestant Reformation and its effects on our culture and society today:

Brad Gregory, the Notre Dame historian, seeks to show how we got this way in his recent book The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. His answers are surprising, and for some readers, controversial. But his book is also important—and in its explanatory power, brilliant.

Gregory argues that today’s relativism and cult of the consumer—what he ironically calls “the goods life”—have roots that run centuries deep. He wastes no time on nostalgia for a golden age that never existed. But he does show with riveting clarity that in the sixteenth century, Protestant Reformers unintentionally set in motion certain ideas that eventually enabled today’s radical self-centeredness.

Gregory also shows that while the Reformers lit the fuse, medieval Catholics laid the dynamite. Late medieval laity were, quite often, profoundly pious. And because they were pious, they minded when their leaders weren’t. Pious laypeople had an appetite for reform precisely because of their devotion. Late medieval clergy too often preached one thing and did another. Greed, simony, nepotism, luxury, sexual license, and schism in the hierarchy created an intolerable gap between Christian preaching and practice.

Many Catholics worked for reform from within. Some had success. Franciscans, Dominicans, and Cistercians owe their origins to medieval reform. Humanists such as Erasmus and Thomas More were part of an international community of letters determined to renew Christian life from the inside. Saints such as Catherine of Siena and Bernard of Clairvaux spoke truth to ecclesiastical power.

But one key difference separated these Catholic voices from the Protestant Reformers: The Catholics believed that the Church had her teachings right. She just needed to actually live them. The Catholics believed that Christ’s presence in the Eucharist and other sacraments, in the Scriptures, in the saints, and in the Church’s historic doctrines offered an authentic, all-encompassing Christian way of life sufficient to sanctify human existence—if it was actually embraced and shorn of its abuses.

The Protestants, preaching sola scriptura, threw much of it away. The Protestants believed that the deposit and structure of Catholic faith were fundamentally flawed, that Christ no longer abided in the Roman Church, and that Scripture alone communicated God’s will. Sola scriptura changed everything for Western Christendom. The Church became the churches, and the process inadvertently, but relentlessly, fueled individual sovereignty and relativism.

Read the rest here.

Unintended Consequences? The Reformation and Today

I enjoyed reading Brad Gregory's Salvation at Stake, his study of the state of Christian martyrdom in 16th century Europe. His most recent book is The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society:

In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism—all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West.

Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge.

The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.

Barton Swaim, author of Scottish Men of Letters and the New Public Sphere, 1802-34, reviewed it for The Wall Street Journal: "Blame It on Calvin and Luther"--

Brad Gregory, a history professor at Notre Dame, is deeply unhappy with modern life. "I wish this book could have had a happier ending," he says late in "The Unintended Reformation," an intellectual history of the West since the religious upheaval of the 16th century, "but that would have happened only if the world in which we are living today were different. And our present world would be different only if the past had not been what it was."

Mr. Gregory describes six ways in which the West has lost its moral and intellectual bearings, and in each case he traces the loss to the Protestant Reformation, when Martin Luther, John Calvin and others led a rebellion against what they perceived to be the Roman Catholic Church's corruption and theological error.

The book begins with a broadside against "supercessionist" views of history: narratives in which supposedly primitive ideas give way to progressively more sophisticated ideas, culminating in those of the enlightened present. The sophisticated ideas of the present, Mr. Gregory notes, always seem to bear a striking similarity to those of the historian and his or her like-minded colleagues in the faculty lounge. The problem with supercessionist histories is that the overwhelming majority of Westerners, unlike most historians, are not disenchanted, secularist intellectuals, and any serious interpretations of history claiming to explain how we got to the present day must also describe the present as it actually is—not as the historian thinks it should be or soon will be. . . .

Read the rest of the review here. Something new for the wish list?