WYH2010HF Christianity 843–1648

Origins of the Reformation

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Long-term issues that needed resolution in 1500

• Abuses, corruption, and worldliness in Church leadership
• Poor lay education
• Anxiety about death and salvation; lack of assurance for salvation
• Poor clerical education; weak vocations
• Criticisms of Church teaching and devotional practice, including relics, indulgences, excessive Marian devotion, the focus on sacramental observance, the Church's "treasury of grace" (not always consonant with the Bible; sometimes too strongly linked to scholasticism; sometimes superstitious; often poorly connected with a changing intellectual and spiritual milieu)
• Conflicts between temporal and spiritual authority
• Questions about papal authority
• Widespread desire for reform

The pope who made things worse

Giovanni de' Medici (1476-1521) was born into the powerful Medici family of Florence. While he was still a child, his well-connected family secured numerous lucrative church offices for him, and his father had him made a cardinal when he was 14 years old. He had a humanist education, culminating in university studies at Pisa. A letter of counsel from his father reflects Renaissance values. He was elected pope (as Leo X) in 1513. "Let us enjoy the papacy, since God has given it to us," he said, according to the Venetian ambassador. His foreign policy was marked by false promises and double-dealing. A lavish patron of the arts, the sponsor of continuing construction in Rome, especially the new St. Peter's, and a man of luxurious and indulgence habits, he exhausted the papal treasury within two years. He tried to increase revenues by creating church offices and selling them. Inter alia, he created 31 new cardinals, an unprecedented number. The famous picture by Raphael shows him pale, corpulent, and narrow-eyed.

His predecessor had convened the 5th Lateran Council, in reaction to a schismatic council called in Pisa by rebel cardinals. He squandered this last opportunity at reform before the Protestant Reformation. The Council sought to increase papal authority, raised questions about humanism, and, in response to the new technology of printing, introduced censorship. Efforts at reform are found in a bull promulgated in the 9th session for regulating appointments to benefices, curial administration, and superstition. At the close of the Council in 1517, the layman Pico della Mirandola delivered a prophetic speech warning the pope that, if he failed to heal the wounds of the Church, God would remove the rotten limbs.

In 1517 he joined a military league against France, which was very expensive and which promoted the opposition of many of the cardinals. A plot to poison the pope was discovered; one cardinal was executed and others were impriosned.

Leo authorized an extensive sale of indulgences, partly for the construction at St. Peter's (pictured right). In Saxony in 1517, the Augustinian friar Martin Luther attacked indulgences, and won widespread popular support. Leo failed to grasp the importance of the new movement, and instead of administering reforms, he sought to silence Luther. Also to collect money for St. Peter's, Leo sent a papal nuncio to Denmark; the king expelled the unpopular man, invited Lutheran theologians to his court, and included in a new law code (1521) provisions tending toward the establishment of an independent state church, although it's not clear whether this law code ever went into effect.

Interpretations of the Reformation

• Advocates and controversialists. In the first century or two after the Reformation, histories were typically written by champions either of the Protestant or of the Catholic churches, and served as weapons of propaganda.
• Early non-controversialists. Writers inclined to religious skepticism, such as Jean Bodin (d. 1596) and Michel de Montaigne (d. 1591), portrayed the Reformation as superstitions or fanaticisms in conflict.
• Enlightenment historians. Pronounced critics of Christianity, such as Voltaire (d. 1778) and von Mosheim (d. 1755), usually stressed non-religious factors in the Reformation, such as the economic interests of the friars who sold indulgences, or the institutional corruptions of the Roman curia.
• Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), usually regarded as the first modern professional historian, researched social and political contexts from archival sources, and made it a point to avoid any rancorous taking of sides. In an elaborate analysis of the general causes of the Reformation, Ranke "misses very few of the numerous factors we are still debating." Dickens and Tonkin, Reformation in historical thought, p. 171. Ranke invented the term "Counter-Reformation".
• Whiggish. The Reformation represented a decisive step towards political freedom, individual conscience, the authority of reason, and the validation of experience
• Early professional church historians in the late 1800s sought to relate the Reformation to broader themes. For Adolf von Harnack (d. 1930), this was the history of dogma; on this basis he assessed Luther's achievement, rather ambivalently. Philip Schaff (1819-1893) took an ecumenical perspective, weighing the strengths of the various confessional alternatives of the Reformation era. Ignaz von Döllinger (1799-1890), like many other later Roman Catholic writers, sought the key to the Reformation in Luther's personality.
• Marxists. The Reformation represents the bourgeois revolution against feudalism, and presages the coming revolution of the proletariat. The Peasants' Revolt looms large in Marxist histories. Karl Kautsky (d. 1938) sought to vindicate the Anabaptist takeover of Münster.
• Nietzsche. The Reformation represented a revolt against the Renaissance (tribalism against internationalism; other-worldliness against the appreciation of this world)
• The social historians saw the Reformation not so much as an ecclesiastical affair or a political event, but as a social movement, in which, according to Lucien Febvre (d. 1956), a rising middle class sought the resolution of a spiritual hunger and a moral crisis.
• Liberal catholics discredited the Reformation, but to a large degree blamed the late medieval Church for its doctrinal confusion and devotional excesses. For Joseph Lortz (1887-1975), Luther, though well-intentioned, had judged the Church on the basis not of its true teaching as a whole, but of isolated distorted bits of its teaching.