by Will Durant
“If you are stronger today than yesterday, it is because of us. What but the Reformation compelled you to reform the Curia, to redeem your clergy from concubinage, to seat men of religion, instead of pagans, in the papal chair? To whom do you owe it that your clergy today have so high a repute for integrity? To the Council of Trent? But to what did you owe the Council of Trent, if not to the Reformation? Without that check your Church might have continued its degeneration from Christianity into paganism until your popes would have been enthroned over an agnostic and epicurean world. Even with the regeneration which we forced upon your Church, the peoples that accept your creed are more negligent of religion, more skeptical of Christianity, than those that adopted the Reformation; compare France with England.
“We have learned to reconcile our piety with the freedom of the mind; and it is our Protestant lands that have seen the greatest flowering of science and philosophy. We hope to adjust our Christianity to the progress of knowledge—but how is this possible to a Church that rejects all the science of the last four centuries?”
Here the humanist enters the argument, and brings both houses down upon his head. “This is the honor and weakness of Protestantism, that it appeals to the intellect, which is always changing; and the strength of Catholicism lies in its refusal to adjust itself to the theories of science, which, in the experience of history, seldom survive the century in which they were born. Catholicism proposes to meet the religious demands of the people, who have barely heard of Copernicus and Darwin, and have never heard of Spinoza and Kant; such people are many and fertile. But how can a religion that speaks to the intellect, and centers around the sermon, adjust itself to an expanding universe in which the planet that claimed to have received God’s Son has become a transitory speck in space, and the species for which He died is but a moment in the phantasmagoria of life? What happens to Protestantism when the Bible that it took as its sole and infallible basis is subjected to a Higher Criticism that turns it from the word of God into the literature of the Hebrews and the transformation of Christ in the mystical theology of Paul?
“The real problem for the modern mind is not between Catholicism and Protestantism, nor between the Reformation and the Renaissance; it is between Christianity and the Enlightenment—that hardly datable era which began in Europe with Francis Bacon, and hitched its hopes to reason, science, and philosophy. As art was the keynote of the Renaissance, and religion the soul of the Reformation, so science and philosophy became the gods of the Enlightenment. From this standpoint the Renaissance was in the direct line of European mental development, and led to the Illumination and Aufklärung; the Reformation was a deviation from that line, a rejection of reason, a reaffirmation of medieval faith.
“And yet, despite its original intolerance, the Reformation rendered two services to the Enlightenment: it broke the authority of dogma, generated a hundred sects that would formerly have died at the stake, and allowed among them such virile debate that reason was finally recognized as the bar before which all sects had to plead their cause unless they were armed with irresistible physical force. In that pleading, that attack and defense, all sects were weakened, all dogmas; and a century after Luther’s exaltation of faith Francis Bacon proclaimed that knowledge is power. In that same seventeenth century thinkers like Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke offered philosophy as a substitute or basis for religion. In the eighteenth century Helvetius, Holbach, and La Mettrie proclaimed open atheism, and Voltaire was called a bigot because he believed in God, This was the challenge that Christianity faced, in a crisis far more profound than the debate between the Catholic and the Protestant version of the medieval creed. The effort of Christianity to survive Copernicus and Darwin is the basic drama of the last three hundred years. What are the struggles of states and classes beside that Armageddon of the soul?”
And now, as we look back over the meandering narrative of these thousand pages, we perceive that our sympathy can go to all the combatants. We can understand the anger of Luther at Roman corruption and dominance, the reluctance of German princes to see German collections fatten Italy, the resolve of Calvin and Knox to build model moral communities, the desire of Henry VIII for an heir, and for authority in his own realm. But we can understand, too, the hopes of Erasmus for a reform that would not poison Christendom with hatred; and we can feel the dismay of devout Roman prelates like Contarini at the prospective dismemberment of a Church that for centuries had been the nurse and custodian of Western civilization, and was still the strongest bulwark against immorality, chaos, and despair.
Nothing of all these efforts was lost. The individual succumbs, but he does not die if he has left something to mankind. Protestantism, in time, helped to regenerate the moral life of Europe, and the Church purified herself into an organization politically weaker but morally stronger than before. One lesson emerges above the smoke of the battle: a religion is at its best when it must live with competition; it tends to intolerance when and where it is unchallenged and supreme. The greatest gift of the Reformation was to provide Europe and America with that competition of faiths which puts each on its mettle, cautions it to tolerance, and gives to our frail minds the zest and test of freedom.
COURAGE, READER: WE NEAR THE END.
Bibliographical Guide
to editions referred to in the Notes
The letters C, P, J, and R after an author’s name indicate
Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and rationalist respectively
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