BELLOC-Europe and the Faith - VII: THE MIDDLE AGES
This is perhaps the greatest of all historical questions, after the
original question: "What was the Church in the Empire of Rome?" A true
answer to this original question gives the nature of that capital
revolution by which Europe came to unity and to maturity and attained to a
full consciousness of itself. An answer to the other question: "What was
the Reformation?" begins to explain our modern ill-ease.
A true answer to the question: "What was the Reformation?" is of such vast
importance, because it is only when we grasp what the Reformation was
that we understand its consequences. Then only do we know how the united
body of European civilization has been cut asunder and by what a wound. The
abomination of industrialism; the loss of land and capital by the people in
great districts of Europe; the failure of modern discovery to serve the end
of man; the series of larger and still larger wars following in a rapidly
rising scale of severity and destruction--till the dead are now counted in
tens of millions; the increasing chaos and misfortune of society--all these
attach one to the other, each falls into its place, and a hundred smaller
phenomena as well, when we appreciate, as today we can, the nature and the
magnitude of that fundamental catastrophe.
It is possible that the perilous business is now drawing to its end, and
that (though those now living will not live to see it) Christendom may
enter into a convalescence: may at last forget the fever and be restored.
With that I am not here concerned. It is my business only to explain that
storm which struck Europe four hundred years ago and within a century
brought Christendom to shipwreck.
The true causes are hidden--for they were spiritual.
In proportion as an historical matter is of import to human kind, in that
proportion does it spring not from apparent--let alone material--causes,
but from some hidden revolution in the human spirit. To pretend an
examination of the secret springs whence the human mind is fed is futile.
The greater the affair, the more directly does it proceed from unseen
sources which the theologian may catalogue, the poet see in vision, the
philosopher explain, but with which positive external history cannot deal,
and which the mere historian cannot handle. It is the function of history
to present the outward thing, as a witness might have seen it, and to show
the reader as much as a spectator could have seen--illuminated indeed by a
knowledge of the past--and a judgment drawn from known succeeding events.
The historian answers the question, "What was?" this or that. To the
question, "Why was it?" if it be in the spiritual order (as are all major
things), the reader must attempt his own reply based upon other aptitudes
than those of historic science.
It is the neglect of this canon which makes barren so much work upon the
past. Read Gibbon's attempt to account for "why" the Catholic Church arose
in the Roman Empire, and mark his empty failure. [Footnote: It is true
that Gibbon was ill equipped for his task because he lacked historical
imagination. He could not grasp the spirit of a past age. He could not
enter into any mood save that of his master, Voltaire. But it is not only
true of Gibbon that he fails to explain the great revolution of A.D.
29-304. No one attempting that explanation has succeeded. It was not of
this world.]
Mark also how all examination of the causes of the French Revolution are
colored by something small and degraded, quite out of proportion to that
stupendous crusade which transformed the modern world. The truth is, that
the historian can only detail those causes, largely material, all evident
and positive, which lie within his province, and such causes are quite
insufficient to explain the full result. Were I here writing "Why" the
Reformation came, my reply would not be historic, but mystic. I should say
that it came "from outside mankind." But that would be to affirm without
the hope of proof, and only in the confidence that all attempts at positive
proof were contemptible. Luckily I am not concerned in so profound an
issue, but only in the presentation of the thing as it was. Upon this I now
set out.
With the close of the Middle Ages two phenomena appeared side by side in
the society of Europe. The first was an ageing and a growing fatigue of the
simple mediaeval scheme; the second was a very rapid accretion of technical
power.
As to the first I have suggested (it is no more than a suggestion), that
the mediaeval scheme of society, though much the best fitted to our race
and much the best expression which it has yet found, though especially
productive of happiness (which here and hereafter is the end of man), was
not properly provided with instruments of survival.
Its science was too imperfect, its institutions too local, though its
philosophy was the widest ever framed and the most satisfying to the human
intelligence.
Whatever be the reason, that society did rapidly grow old. Its every
institution grew formal or debased. The Guilds from true coöperative
partnerships for the proper distribution of the means of production, and
for the prevention of a proletariat with its vile cancer of capitalism,
tended to become privileged bodies. Even the heart of Christian Europe, the
village, showed faint signs that it might become an oligarchy of privileged
farmers with some land and less men at their orders. The Monastic orders
were tainted in patches up and down Europe, with worldliness, with an
abandonment of their strict rule, and occasionally with vice. Civil
government grew befogged with tradition and with complex rules. All manner
of theatrical and false trappings began to deform society, notably the
exaggeration of heraldry and a riot of symbolism of which very soon no one
could make head or tail.
The temporal and visible organization of the Church did not escape in such
a welter. The lethargy, avarice, and routine from which that organization
suffered, has been both grossly exaggerated and set out of perspective.
A wild picture of it has been drawn by its enemies. But in a degree the
temporal organization of the Church had decayed at the close of the Middle
Ages. It was partly too much a taking of things for granted, a conviction
that nothing could really upset the unity of Europe; partly the huge
concentration of wealth in clerical hands, which proceeded from the new
economic activity all over Europe, coupled with the absolute power of the
clergy in certain centres and the universal economic function of Rome;
partly a popular loss of faith. All these between them helped to do the
business. At any rate the evil was there.
All institutions (says Machiavelli) must return to their origins, or they
fail. There appeared throughout Europe in the last century of united
Europe, breaking out here and there, sporadic attempts to revivify the
common life, especially upon its spiritual side, by a return to the
primitive communal enthusiasms in which religion necessarily has its
historical origins.
This was in no way remarkable. Neither was it remarkable that each such
sporadic and spontaneous outburst should have its own taint or vice or
false color.
What was remarkable and what made the period unique in the whole history
of Christendom (save for the Arian flood) was the incapacity of the
external organization of the Church at the moment to capture the spiritual
discontent, and to satisfy the spiritual hunger of which these errors were
the manifestation.
In a slower time the external organization of the Church would have
absorbed and regulated the new things, good and evil. It would have
rendered the heresies ridiculous in turn, it would have canalized the
exaltations, it would have humanized the discoveries. But things were
moving at a rate more and more rapid, the whole society of Western
Christendom raced from experience to experience. It was flooded with the
newly found manuscripts of antiquity, with the new discoveries of unknown
continents, with new commerce, printing, and, an effect perhaps rather than
a cause, the complete rebirth of painting, architecture, sculpture and all
the artistic expression of Europe.
In point of fact this doubt and seething and attempted return to early
religious enthusiasm were not digested and were not captured. The spiritual
hunger of the time was not fed. Its extravagance was not exposed to the
solvent of laughter or to the flame of a sufficient indignation: they were
therefore neither withered nor eradicated. For the spirit had grown old.
The great movement of the spirit in Europe was repressed haphazard and,
quite as much haphazard, encouraged, but there seemed no one corporate
force present throughout Christendom which would persuade, encourage
and command: even the Papacy, the core of our unity, was shaken by long
division and intrigue.
Let it be clearly understood that in the particular form of special
heresies the business was local, peculiar and contemptible. Wycliffe, for
instance, was no more the morning star of the Reformation than Catherine of
Braganza's Tangier Dowry, let us say, was the morning star of the modern
English Empire. Wycliffe was but one of a great number of men who were
theorizing up and down Europe upon the nature of society and morals, each
with his special metaphysic of the Sacrament; each with his "system."
Such men have always abounded; they abound today. Some of Wycliffe's
extravagances resemble what many Protestants happen, later, to have held;
others (such as his theory that you could not own land unless you were in
a state of grace) were of the opposite extreme to Protestantism. And so it
is with the whole lot: and there were hundreds of them. There was no common
theory, no common feeling in the various reactions against a corrupted
ecclesiastical authority which marked the end of the Middle Ages. There was
nothing the least like what we call Protestantism today. Indeed that spirit
and mental color does not appear until a couple of generations after the
opening of the Reformation itself.
What there was, was a widespread discontent and exasperated friction
against the existing, rigid, and yet deeply decayed, temporal organization
of religious affairs; and in their uneasy fretting against that unworthy
rule, the various centres of irritation put up now one startling theory
which they knew would annoy the official Church, now another, perhaps
the exact opposite of the last. Now they denied something as old as
Europe--such as the right to property: now a new piece of usage or
discipline such as Communion in one kind: now a partial regional rule, such
as celibacy. Some went stark mad. Others, at the contrary extreme, did no
more than expose false relics.
A general social ill-ease was the parent of all these sporadic heresies.
Many had elaborate systems, but none of these systems was a true creed,
that is, a motive. No one of the outbursts had any philosophic driving
power behind it; all and each were no more than violent and blind reactions
against a clerical authority which gave scandal and set up an intolerable
strain.
Shall I give an example? One of the most popular forms which the protest
took, was what I have just mentioned, a demand for Communion in both kinds
and for the restoration of what was in many places ancient custom, the
drinking from the cup after the priest.
Could anything better prove the truth that mere irritation against the
external organization of the Church was the power at work? Could any point
have less to do with the fundamentals of the Faith? Of course, as an
implication of false doctrine--as that the Priesthood is not an Order,
or that the Presence of Our Lord is not in both species--it had its
importance. But in itself how trivial a "kick." Why should anyone desire
the cup save to mark dissension from established custom!
Here is another example. Prominent among the later expressions of
discontent you have the Adamites, [Footnote: The rise of these oddities
is nearly contemporary with Wycliffe and is, like his career, about one
hundred years previous to the Reformation proper: the sects are of various
longevity. Some, like the Calvinists, have, while dwindling rapidly in
numbers, kept their full doctrines for now four hundred years, others
like the Johanna Southcottites hardly last a lifetime: others like the
Modernists a decade or less: others like the Mormons near a century, their
close is not yet. I myself met a man in Colorado in 1891 whose friends
thought him the Messiah. Unlike the Wycliffites certain members of the
Adamites until lately survived in Austria.] who among other tenets rejected
clothes upon the more solemn occasions of their ritual and went naked:
raving maniacs. The whole business was a rough and tumble of protest
against the breakdown of a social system whose breakdown seemed the more
terrible because it had been such a haven! Because it was in essence
founded upon the most intimate appetites of European men. The heretics were
angry because they had lost their home.
This very general picture omits Huss and the national movement for which he
stood. It omits the Papal Schism; the Council of Constance; all the great
facts of the fifteenth century on its religious side. I am concerned only
with the presentation of the general character of the time, and that
character was what I have described: an irrepressible, largely justified,
discontent breaking out: a sort of chronic rash upon the skin of Christian
Europe, which rash the body of Christendom could neither absorb nor cure.
Now at this point--and before we leave the fifteenth century--there is
another historical feature which it is of the utmost importance to seize
if we are to understand what followed; for it was a feature common to
all European thought until a time long after the final establishment of
permanent cleavage in Europe. It is a feature which nearly all historians
neglect and yet one manifest upon the reading of any contemporary
expression. That feature is this: No one in the Reformation dreamt a
divided Christendom to be possible.
This flood of heretical movement was oecumenical; it was not peculiar to
one race or climate or culture or nation. The numberless uneasy innovators
thought, even the wildest of them, in terms of Europe as a whole. They
desired to affect the universal Church and change it en bloc. They had
no local ambition. They stood for no particular blood or temperament; they
sprang up everywhere, bred by the universal ill-ease of a society still
universal. You were as likely to get an enthusiast declaring himself to
be the Messiah in Seville as an enthusiast denying the Real Presence in
Aberdeen.
That fatal habit of reading into the past what we know of its future has
in this matter most deplorably marred history, and men, whether Protestant
or Catholic, who are now accustomed to Protestantism, read Protestantism
and the absurd idea of a local religion--a religion true in one place and
untrue in another--into a time where the least instructed clown would have
laughed in your face at such nonsense.
The whole thing, the evil coupled with a quite ineffectual resistance to
the evil, was a thing common to all Europe.
It is the nature of any organic movement to progress or to recede. But this
movement was destined to advance with devastating rapidity, and that on
account of what I have called the second factor in the Reformation: the
very rapid accretion in technical power which marked the close of the
Middle Ages.
Printing; navigation; all mensuration; the handling of metals and every
material--all these took a sudden leap forward with the Renaissance, the
revival of arts: that vast stirring of the later Middle Ages which promised
to give us a restored antiquity Christianized: which was burnt in the flame
of a vile fanaticism, and has left us nothing but ashes and incommiscible
salvage.
Physical knowledge, the expansion of physical experience and technical
skill, were moving in the century before the Reformation at such a rate
that a contemporary spiritual phenomenon, if it advanced at all, was bound
to advance very rapidly, and this spiritual eruption in Europe came to
a head just at the moment when the contemporary expansion of travel, of
economic activity and of the revival of learning, had also emerged in their
full force.
It was in the first twenty years of the sixteenth century that the
coalescing of the various forces of spiritual discontent and revolt
began to be apparent. Before 1530 the general storm was to burst and the
Reformation proper to be started on its way.
But as a preliminary to that matter, the reader should first understand how
another and quite disconnected social development had prepared the way for
the triumph of the reformers. This development was the advent of Absolute
Government in civil affairs.
Here and there in the long history of Europe there crops up an isolated
accident, very striking, very effective, of short duration. We have already
seen that the Norman race was one of these. Tyranny in civil government
(which accompanied the Reformation) was another.
A claim to absolute monarchy is one of the commonest and most enduring
of historical things. Countless centuries of the old Empires of the East
were passed under such a claim, the Roman Empire was based upon it; the
old Russian State was made by it, French society luxuriated in it for one
magnificent century, from the accession of Louis XIV. till Fontenoy. It is
the easiest and (when it works) the most prompt of all instruments.
But the sense of an absolute civil government at the moment of the
Reformation was something very different. It was a demand, an appetite,
proceeding from the whole community, a worship of civil authority. It was
deification of the State and of law; it was the adoration of the Executive.
"This governs me; therefore I will worship it and do all it tells me." Such
is the formula for the strange passion which has now and then seized great
bodies of human beings intoxicated by splendor and by the vivifying effects
of command. Like all manias (for it mania) this exaggerated passion is
hardly comprehended once it is past. Like all manias, while it is present
it overrides every other emotion.
Europe, in the time of which I speak, suffered such a mania. The free
cities manifested that disease quite as much as the great monarchical
states. In Rome itself the temporal power of the Papal sovereign was then
magnificent beyond all past parallel. In Geneva Calvin was a god. In Spain
Charles and Philip governed two worlds without question. In England the
Tudor dynasty was worshipped blindly. Men might and did rebel against a
particular government, but it was only to set up something equally absolute
in its place. Not the form but the fact of government was adored.
I will not waste the reader's time in any discussion upon the causes of
that astonishing political fever. It must suffice to say that for a moment
it hypnotized the whole world. It would have been incomprehensible to the
Middle Ages. It was incomprehensible to the nineteenth century. It wholly
occupied the sixteenth. If we understand it, we largely understand what
made the success of the Reformation possible.
Well, then, the increasing discontent of the masses against the decaying
forms of the Middle Ages, and the increasing irritation against the
temporal government and the organization of the Church, came to a head just
at that moment when civil government was worshipped as an awful and almost
divine thing.
Into such an atmosphere was launched the last and the strongest of the
overt protests against the old social scheme, and in particular against the
existing power of the Papacy, especially upon its economic side.
The name most prominently associated with the crisis is that of Martin
Luther, an Augustinian monk, German by birth and speech, and one of those
exuberant sensual, rather inconsequential, characters which so easily
attract hearty friendships, and which can never pretend to organization or
command, though certainly to creative power. What he precisely meant or
would do, no man could tell, least of all himself. He was "out" for protest
and he floated on the crest of the general wave of change. That he ever
intended, nay, that he could ever have imagined, a disruption of the
European Unity is impossible.
Luther (a voice, no leader) was but one of many: had he never lived, the
great bursting wave would have crashed onward much the same. One scholar
after another (and these of every blood and from every part of Europe)
joined in the upheaval. The opposition of the old monastic training to the
newly revived classics, of the ascetic to the new pride of life, of the
logician to the mystic, all these in a confused whirl swept men of every
type into the disruption. One thing only united them. They were all
inflamed with a vital necessity for change. Great names which in the
ultimate challenge refused to destroy and helped to preserve--the greatest
is that of Erasmus; great names which even appear in the roll of that
of the Catholic martyrs--the blessed Thomas More is the greatest of
these--must here be counted with the names of men like the narrow Calvin on
the one hand, the large Rabelais upon the other. Not one ardent mind in the
first half of the sixteenth century but was swept into the stream.
Now all this would and must have been quieted in the process of time, the
mass of Christendom would have settled back into unity, the populace would
have felt instinctively the risk they ran of spoliation by the rich and
powerful, if the popular institutions of Christendom broke down: the masses
would have all swung round to solidifying society after an upheaval (it is
their function): we should have attained repose and Europe, united again,
would have gone forward as she did after the rocking of four hundred years
before--but for that other factor of which I have spoken, the passion which
this eager creative moment felt for the absolute in civil government--that
craving for the something godlike which makes men worship a flag, a throne
or a national hymn.
This it was which caught up and, in the persons of particular men, used
the highest of the tide. Certain princes in the Germanies (who had, of all
the groups of Europe, least grasped the meaning of authority) befriended
here one heresiarch and there another. The very fact that the Pope of Rome
stood for one of these absolute governments put other absolute governments
against him. The wind of the business rose; it became a quarrel of
sovereigns. And the sovereigns decided, and powerful usurping nobles or
leaders decided, the future of the herd.
Two further characters appeared side by side in the earthquake that was
breaking up Europe.
The first was this: the tendency to fall away from European unity seemed
more and more marked in those outer places which lay beyond the original
limits of the old Roman Empire, and notably in the Northern Netherlands and
in Northern Germany--where men easily submitted to the control of wealthy
merchants and of hereditary landlords.
The second was this: a profound distrust of the new movement, a reaction
against it, a feeling that moral anarchy was too profitable to the rich and
the cupidinous, began at first in a dull, later in an angry way, to stir
the masses of the populace throughout all Christendom.
The stronger the old Latin sense of human equality was, the more the
populace felt this, the more they instinctively conceived of the
Reformation as something that would rob them of some ill-understood but
profound spiritual guarantee against slavery, exploitation and oppression.
There began a sort of popular grumbling against the Reformers, who were now
already schismatic: their rich patrons fell under the same suspicion. By
the time the movement had reached a head and by the time the central power
of the Church had been openly defied by the German princes, this protest
took, as in France and England and the valley of the Rhone (the ancient
seats of culture), a noise like the undertone of the sea before bad
weather. In the outer Germanies it was not a defence of Christendom at all,
but a brutish cry for more food. But everywhere the populace stirred.
A general observer, cognizant of what was to come, would have been certain
at that moment that the populace would rise. When it rose intelligently
the movement against the Church and civilization would come to nothing. The
Revolt elsewhere--in half barbaric Europe--would come to no more than the
lopping off of outer and insignificant things. The Baltic Plain, sundry
units of the outer Germanies and Scandinavia, probably Hungary, possibly
Bohemia, certain mountain valleys in Switzerland and Savoy and France and
the Pyrenees, which had suffered from lack of instruction and could easily
be recovered--these would be affected. The outer parts, which had never
been within the pale of the Roman Empire might go. But the soul and
intelligence of Europe would be kept sound; its general body would reunite
and Christendom would once more reappear whole and triumphant. It would
have reconquered these outer parts at its leisure: and Poland was a sure
bastion. We should, within a century, have been ourselves once more:
Christian men.
So it would have been--but for one master tragedy, which changed the whole
scheme. Of the four great remaining units of Western civilization, Iberia,
Italy, Britain, Gaul, one, at this critical moment, broke down by a tragic
accident and lost continuity. It was hardly intended. It was a consequence
of error much more than an act of will. But it had full effect.
The breakdown of Britain and her failure to resist disruption was the chief
event of all. It made the Reformation permanent. It confirmed a final
division in Europe.
By a curious accident, one province, extraneous to the Empire, Ireland,
heroically preserved what the other extraneous provinces, the Germanies and
Scandinavia, were to lose. In spite of the loss of Britain, and cut off
by that loss from direct succor, Ireland preserved the tradition of
civilization.
It must be my next business to describe the way in which Britain failed
in the struggle, and, at the hands of the King, and of a little group of
avaricious men (such as the Howards among the gentry, and the Cecils among
the adventurers) changed for the worse the history of Europe.
One thing stands out in the fate of modern Europe: the profound cleavage
due to the Reformation. One thing made that wound (it was almost mortal) so
deep and lasting: the failure of one ancient province of civilization,
and one only, to keep the Faith: this province whereof I write: Britain.
The capital event, the critical moment, in the great struggle of the Faith
against the Reformation, was the defection of Britain.
It is a point which the modern historian, who is still normally
anti-Catholic, does not and cannot make. Yet the defection of Britain from
the Faith of Europe three hundred years ago is certainly the most important
historical event in the last thousand years: between the saving of Europe
from the barbarians and these our own times. It is perhaps the most
important historical event since the triumph of the Catholic Church under
Constantine.
Let me recapitulate the factors of the problem as they would be seen by
an impartial observer from some great distance in time, or in space, or
in mental attitude. Let me put them as they would appear to one quite
indifferent to, and remote from, the antagonists.
To such an observer the history of Europe would be that of the great Roman
Empire passing through the transformation I have described: its mind first
more and more restless, then more and more tending to a certain conclusion,
and that conclusion the Catholic Church.
To summarize what has gone before: the Catholic Church becomes by the fifth
century the soul, the vital principle, the continuity of Europe. It next
suffers grievously from the accident, largely geographical, of the Eastern
schism. It is of its nature perpetually subject to assault; from within,
because it deals with matters not open to positive proof; from without,
because all those, whether aliens or guests or parasites, who are not of
our civilization, are naturally its enemies.
The Roman Empire of the West, in which the purity and the unity of this
soul were preserved from generation to generation, declined in its body
during the Dark Ages--say, up to and rather beyond the year 1000. It
became coarsened and less in its material powers. It lost its central
organization, the Imperial Court (which was replaced first by provincial
military leaders or "kings," then, later, by a mass of local lordships
jumbled into more or less national groups). In building, in writing, in
cooking, in clothing, in drawing, in sculpture, the Roman Empire of the
West (which is ourselves) forgot all but the fundamentals of its arts--but
it expanded so far as its area is concerned. A whole belt of barbaric
Germany received the Roman influence--Baptism and the Mass. With the Creed
there came to these outer parts reading and writing, building in brick
and stone--all the material essentials of our civilization--and what is
characteristic of that culture, the power of thinking more clearly.
It is centuries before this slow digestion of the barbarian reached
longitude ten degrees east, and the Scandinavian peninsula. But a thousand
years after Our Lord it has reached even these, and there remains between
the unbroken tradition of our civilization in the West and the schismatic
but Christian civilization of the Greek Church, nothing but a belt of
paganism from the corner of the Baltic southward, which belt is lessened,
year after year, by the armed efforts and the rational dominance of Latin
culture. Our Christian and Roman culture proceeds continuously eastward,
mastering the uncouth.
After this general picture of a civilization dominating and mastering in
its material decline a vastly greater area than it had known in the height
of its material excellence--this sort of expansion in the dark--the
impartial observer, whom we have supposed, would remark a sort of dawn.
That dawn came with the eleventh century; 1000-1100. The Norman race, the
sudden invigoration of the Papacy, the new victories in Spain, at last the
first Crusade, mark a turn in the tide of material decline, and that tide
works very rapidly towards a new and intense civilization which we call
that of the Middle Ages: that high renewal which gives Europe a second
and most marvelous life, which is a late reflowering of Rome, but of Rome
revivified with the virtue and the humor of the Faith.
The second thing that the observer would note in so general a picture would
be the peculiar exception formed within it by the group of large islands
lying to the North and West of the Continent. Of these the larger, Britain,
had been a true Roman Province; but very early in the process--in the
middle and end of the fifth century--it had on the first assault of the
barbarians been cut off for more than the lifetime of a man. Its gate
had been held by the barbarian. Then it was re-Christianized almost as
thoroughly as though even its Eastern part had never lost the authority of
civilization. The Mission of St. Augustine recaptured Britain--but Britain
is remarkable in the history of civilization for the fact that alone of
civilized lands it needed to be recaptured at all. The western island of
the two, the smaller island, Ireland, presented another exception.
It was not compelled to the Christian culture, as were the German
barbarians of the Continent, by arms. No Charlemagne with his Gallic armies
forced it tardily to accept baptism. It was not savage like the Germanies;
it was therefore under no necessity to go to school. It was not a morass
of shifting tribes; it was a nation. But in a most exceptional fashion,
though already possessed, and perhaps because so possessed, of a high
pagan culture of its own, it accepted within the lifetime of a man, and by
spiritual influences alone, the whole spirit of the Creed. The civilization
of the Roman West was accepted by Ireland, not as a command nor as an
influence, but as a discovery.
Now let this peculiar fate of the two islands to the north and west of the
Continent remain in the observer's mind, and he will note, when the shock
of what is called "the Reformation" comes, new phenomena attaching to those
islands, cognate to their early history.
Those phenomena are the thesis which I have to present in the pages that
follow.
What we call "the Reformation" was essentially the reaction of the
barbaric, the ill-tutored and the isolated places external to the old
and deep-rooted Roman civilization, against the influences of that
civilization. The Reformation was not racial. Even if there were such a
physical thing as a "Teutonic Race" (and there is nothing of the kind), the
Reformation shows no coincidence with that race. The Reformation is simply
the turning-back of that tide of Roman culture which, for five hundred
years, had set steadily forward and had progressively dominated the
insufficient by the sufficient, the slower by the quicker, the confused by
the clear-headed. It was a sort of protest by the conquered against a moral
and intellectual superiority which offended them. The Slavs of Bohemia
joined in that sincere protest of the lately and insufficiently civilized,
quite as strongly as, and even earlier than, the vague peoples of the Sandy
Heaths along the Baltic. The Scandinavian, physically quite different from
these tribes of the Baltic Plain, comes into the game. Wretched villages in
the mark of Brandenburg, as Slavonic in type as the villages of Bohemia,
revolt as naturally against exalted and difficult mystery as do the
isolated villages of the Swedish valleys or the isolated rustics of the
Cevennes or the Alps. The revolt is confused, instinctive, and therefore
enjoying the sincere motive which accompanies such risings, but deprived
of unity and of organizing power. There has never been a fixed Protestant
creed. The common factor has been, and is, reaction against the traditions
of Europe.
Now the point to seize is this:
Inimical as such a revolt was to souls or (to speak upon the mere
historical plane) to civilization, bad as it was that the tide of culture
should have begun to ebb from the far regions which it had once so
beneficently flooded, the Reformation, that is, the reaction against the
unity, the discipline, and the clear thought of Europe, would never have
counted largely in human affairs had it been confined to the external
fringe of the civilized world. That fringe would probably have been
reconquered. The inherent force attaching to reality and to the stronger
mind should have led to its recovery. The Northern Germanies were, as a
fact, reconquered when Richelieu stepped in and saved them from their
Southern superiors. But perhaps it would not have been reconquered. Perhaps
it would have lapsed quite soon into its original paganism. At any rate
European culture would have continued undivided and strong without these
outer regions. Unfortunately a far worse thing happened.
Europe was rent and has remained divided.
The disaster was accomplished through forces I will now describe.
Though the revolt was external to the foundations of Europe, to the ancient
provinces of the Empire, yet an external consequence of that revolt arose
within the ancient provinces. It may be briefly told. The wealthy took
advantage within the heart of civilization itself of this external revolt
against order; for it is always to the advantage of the wealthy to deny
general conceptions of right and wrong, to question a popular philosophy
and to weaken the drastic and immediate power of the human will, organized
throughout the whole community. It is always in the nature of great
wealth to be insanely tempted (though it should know from active experience
how little wealth can give), to push on to more and more domination
over the bodies of men--and it can do so best by attacking fixed social
restraints.
The landed squires then, and the great merchants, powerfully supported by
the Jewish financial communities in the principal towns, felt that--with
the Reformation--their opportunity had come. The largest fortune holders,
the nobles, the merchants of the ports and local capitals even in Gaul
(that nucleus and stronghold of ordered human life) licked their lips.
Everywhere in Northern Italy, in Southern Germany, upon the Rhine, wherever
wealth had congested in a few hands, the chance of breaking with the old
morals was a powerful appeal to the wealthy; and, therefore, throughout
Europe, even in its most ancient seats of civilization, the outer barbarian
had allies.
These rich men, whose avarice betrayed Europe from within, had no excuse.
Theirs was not any dumb instinctive revolt like that of the Outer
Germanies, the Outer Slavs, nor the neglected mountain valleys, against
order and against clear thought, with all the hard consequences that clear
thought brings. They were in no way subject to enthusiasm for the vaguer
emotions roused by the Gospel or for the more turgid excitements derivable
from Scripture and an uncorrected orgy of prophecy. They were "on the
make." The rich in Montpelier and Nīmes, a knot of them in Rome itself,
many in Milan, in Lyons, in Paris, enlisted intellectual aid for the
revolt, flattered the atheism of the Renaissance, supported the strong
inflamed critics of clerical misliving, and even winked solemnly at the
lunatic inspirations of obscure men and women filled with "visions." They
did all these things as though their object was religious change. But their
true object was money.
One group, and one alone, of the European nations was too recently filled
with combat against vile non-Christian things to accept any parley with
this anti-Christian turmoil. That unit was the Iberian Peninsula. It is
worthy of remark, especially on the part of those who realize that the
sword fits the hand of the Church and that Catholicism is never more alive
than when it is in arms, I say it is worthy of remark by these that Spain
and Portugal through the very greatness of an experience still recent when
the Reformation broke, lost the chance of combat. There came indeed, from
Spain (but from the Basque nation there) that weapon of steel, the Society
of Jesus, which St. Ignatius formed, and which, surgical and military,
saved the Faith, and therefore Europe. But the Iberian Peninsula rejecting
as one whole and with contempt and with abhorrence (and rejecting rightly)
any consideration of revolt--even among its rich men--thereby lost
its opportunity for combat. It did not enjoy the religious wars which
revivified France, and it may be urged that Spain would be the stronger
today had it fallen to her task, as it did to the general populace of Gaul,
to come to hand-grips with the Reformation at home, to test it, to know it,
to dominate it, to bend the muscles upon it, and to reemerge triumphant
from the struggle.
I say, then, that there was present in the field against the Church a
powerful ally for the Reformers: and that ally was the body of immoral
rich who hoped to profit by a general break in the popular organization of
society. The atheism and the wealth, the luxury and the sensuality, the
scholarship and aloofness of the Renaissance answered, over the heads of
the Catholic populace, the call of barbarism. The Iconoclasts of greed
joined hands with the Iconoclasts of blindness and rage and with the
Iconoclasts of academic pride.
Nevertheless, even with such allies, barbarism would have failed, the
Reformation would today be but an historical episode without fruit, Europe
would still be Christendom, had not there been added the decisive factor of
all--which was the separation of Britain.
Now how did Britain go, and why was the loss of Britain of such capital
importance?
The loss of Britain was of such capital importance because Britain alone
of those who departed, was Roman, and therefore capable of endurance and
increase. And why did Britain fail in that great ordeal? It is a question
harder to answer.
The province of Britain was not a very great one in area or in numbers,
when the Reformation broke out. It was, indeed, very wealthy for its size,
as were the Netherlands, but its mere wealth does not account for the
fundamental importance of the loss of Britain to the Faith in the sixteenth
century. The real point was that one and only one of the old Roman
provinces with their tradition of civilization, letters, persuasive power,
multiple soul--one and only one went over to the barbaric enemy and gave
that enemy its aid. That one was Britain. And the consequence of its
defection was the perpetuation and extension of an increasingly evil
division within the structure of the West.
To say that Britain lost hold of tradition in the sixteenth century because
Britain is "Teutonic," is to talk nonsense. It is to explain a real problem
by inventing unreal words. Britain is not "Teutonic," nor does the word
"Teutonic" itself mean anything definite. To say that Britain revolted
because the seeds of revolt were stronger in her than in any ancient
province of Europe, is to know nothing of history. The seeds of revolt
were in her then as they were in every other community; as they must be in
every individual who may find any form of discipline a burden which he is
tempted, in a moment of disorder, to lay down. But to pretend that England
and the lowlands of Scotland, to pretend that the Province of Britain in
our general civilization was more ready for the change than the infected
portions of Southern Gaul, or the humming towns of Northern Italy, or the
intense life of Hainult, or Brabant, is to show great ignorance of the
European past.
Well, then, how did Britain break away?
I beg the reader to pay a special attention to the next page or so. I
believe it to be of capital value in explaining the general history of
Europe, and I know it to be hardly ever told; or--if told at all--told only
in fragments.
England went because of three things. First, her Squires had already become
too powerful. In other words, the economic power of a small class of
wealthy men had grown, on account of peculiar insular conditions, greater
than was healthy for the community.
Secondly, England was, more than any other part of Western Europe (save
the Batavian March), [Footnote: I mean Belgium: that frontier of Roman
Influence upon the lower Rhine which so happily held out for the Faith
and just preserved it.] a series of markets and of ports, a place of very
active cosmopolitan influence, in which new opportunities for the corrupt,
new messages of the enthusiastic, were frequent.
In the third place, that curious phenomena on which I dwelt in the last
chapter, the superstitious attachment of citizens to the civil power, to
awe of, and devotion to, the monarch, was exaggerated in England as nowhere
else.
Now put these three things together, especially the first and third (for
the second was both of minor importance and more superficial), and you will
appreciate why England fell.
One small, too wealthy class, tainted with the atheism that always creeps
into wealth long and securely enjoyed, was beginning to possess too much of
English land. It would take far too long to describe here what the process
had been. It is true that the absolute monopoly of the soil, the gripping
and the strangling of the populace by landlords, is a purely Protestant
development. Nothing of that kind had happened or would have been conceived
of as possible in pre-Reformation England; but still something like a
quarter of the land (or a little less) had already before the Reformation
got into the full possession of one small class which had also begun to
encroach upon the judiciary, in some measure to supplant the populace in
local law-making, and quite appreciably to supplant the King in central
law-making.
Let me not be misunderstood; the England of the fifteenth century, the
England of the generation just before the Reformation, was not an England
of Squires; it was not an England of landlords; it was still an England
of Englishmen. The towns were quite free. To this day old boroughs nearly
always show a great number of freeholds. The process by which the later
English aristocracy (now a plutocracy) had grown up, was but in germ before
the Reformation. Nor had that germ sprouted. But for the Reformation it
would not have matured. Sooner or later a popular revolt (had the Faith
revived) would have killed the growing usurpation of the wealthy. But the
germ was there; and the Reformation coming just as it did, both was helped
by the rich and helped them.
The slow acquisition of considerable power over the Courts of Law and over
the soil of the country by an oligarchy, imperfect though that acquisition
was as yet, already presented just after 1500 a predisposing condition
to the disease. It may be urged that if the English people had fought
the growing power of the Squires more vigorously, the Squires would not
have mastered them as they did, during and on account of the religious
revolution. Possibly; and the enemies of the English people are quick to
suggest that some native sluggishness permitted the gradual weighing down
of the social balance in favor of the rich. But no one who can even pretend
to know mediaeval England will say that the English consciously desired
or willingly permitted such a state of affairs to grow up. Successful
foreign wars, dynastic trouble, a recent and vigorous awakening of
national consciousness, which consciousness had centred in the wealthier
classes--all these combined to let the evil in without warning, and, on
the eve of the Reformation, a rich, avaricious class was already empowered
to act in Britain, ready to grasp, as all the avaricious classes were
throughout the Western world, at the opportunity to revolt against that
Faith which has ever suspected, constrained and reformed the tyranny of
wealth.
Now add to this the strange, but at that time very real, worship of
government as a fetish. This spirit did not really strengthen government:
far from it. A superstition never strengthens its object, nor even makes
of the supposed power of that object a reality. But though it did not
give real power to the long intention of the prince, it gave to the
momentary word of the prince a fantastic power. In such a combination of
circumstances--nascent oligarchy, but the prince worshipped--you get,
holding the position of prince, Henry VIII., a thorough Tudor, that is, a
man weak almost to the point of irresponsibility where his passions were
concerned; violent from that fundamental weakness which, in the absence of
opposition, ruins things as effectively as any strength.
No executive power in Europe was less in sympathy with the revolt against
civilization than was the Tudor family. Upon the contrary, Henry VII., his
son, and his two granddaughters if anything exceeded in their passion for
the old order of the Western world. But at the least sign of resistance,
Mary who burnt, Elizabeth who intrigued, Henry, their father, who pillaged,
Henry, their grandfather, who robbed and saved, were one. To these
characters slight resistance was a spur; with strong manifold opposition
they were quite powerless to deal. Their minds did not grip (for their
minds, though acute, were not large) but their passions shot. And one
may compare them, when their passions of pride, of lust, of jealousy, of
doting, of avarice or of facile power were aroused, to vehement children.
Never was there a ruling family less statesmanlike; never one less full of
stuff and of creative power.
Henry, urged by an imperious young woman, who had gained control of him,
desired a divorce from his wife, Katherine of Aragon, grown old for him.
The Papal Court temporized with him and opposed him. He was incapable of
negotiation and still more incapable of foresight. His energy, which was
"of an Arabian sort," blasted through the void, because a void was there:
none would then withstand the Prince. Of course, it seemed to him no more
than one of these recurrent quarrels with the mundane power of Rome, which
all Kings (and Saints among them) had engaged in for many hundred years.
All real powers thus conflict in all times. But, had he known it (and he
did not know it), the moment was fatally inopportune for playing that game.
Henry never meant to break permanently with the unity of Christendom.
A disruption of that unity was probably inconceivable to him. He meant
to "exercise pressure." All his acts from the decisive Proclamation of
September 19, 1530, onwards prove it. But the moment was the moment of a
breaking-point throughout Europe, and he, Henry, blundered into disaster
without knowing what the fullness of that moment was. He was devout,
especially to the Blessed Sacrament. He kept the Faith for himself, and he
tried hard to keep it for others. But having lost unity, he let in what he
loathed. Not, so long as he lived, could those doctrines of the Reformers
triumph here: but he had compromised with their spirit, and at his death a
strong minority--perhaps a tenth of England, more of London--was already
hostile to the Creed.
It was the same thing with the suppression of the monasteries. Henry meant
no effect on religion by that loot: he, none the less, destroyed it.
He intended to enrich the Crown: he ruined it. In the matter of their
financial endowment, an economic crisis, produced by the unequal growth of
economic powers, had made the monastic foundation ripe for re-settlement.
Religious orders were here wealthy without reason--poor in spirit and
numbers, but rich in land; there impoverished without reason--rich in
popularity and spiritual power, but poor in land. The dislocation, which
all institutions necessarily suffer on the economic side through the mere
efflux of time, inclined every government in Europe to a re-settlement
of religious endowment. Everywhere it took place; everywhere it involved
dissolution and restoration.
But Henry did not re-settle. He plundered and broke. He used the
contemporary idolatry of executive power just as much at Reading or in the
Blackfriars of London, where unthinking and immediate popular feeling was
with him, as at Glastonbury where it was against him, as in Yorkshire where
it was in arms, as in Galway where there was no bearing with it at all.
There was no largeness in him nor any comprehension of complexity, and
when in this Jacobin, unexampled way, he had simply got rid of that which
he should have restored and transformed, of what effect was that vast act
of spoliation? It paralyzed the Church. It ultimately brought down the
Monarchy.
From a fourth to a third of the economic power over the means of
production in England, which had been vested top-heavily in the religious
foundations--here, far too rich, there, far too poor--Henry got by one
enormous confiscation. Yet he made no permanent addition to the wealth of
the Crown. On the contrary, he started its decline. The land passed by
an instinctive multiple process--but very rapidly--to the already powerful
class which had begun to dominate the villages. Then, when it was too
late, the Tudors attempted to stem the tide. But the thing was done. Upon
the indifference which is always common to a society long and profoundly
Catholic and ignorant of heresy, or, having conquered heresy, ignorant at
any rate of struggle for the Faith, two ardent minorities converged: the
small minority of confused enthusiasts who really did desire what they
believed to be a restoration of "primitive" Christianity: the much larger
minority of men now grown almost invincibly powerful in the economic
sphere. The Squires, twenty years after Henry's death, had come to possess,
through the ruin of religion, something like half the land of England.
With the rapidity of a fungus growth the new wealth spread over the
desolation of the land. The enriched captured both the Universities, all
the Courts of Justice, most of the public schools. They won their great
civil war against the Crown. Within a century after Henry's folly, they had
established themselves in the place of what had once been the monarchy and
central government of England. The impoverished Crown resisted in vain;
they killed one embarrassed King--Charles I., and they set up his son,
Charles II., as an insufficiently salaried puppet. Since their victory over
the Crown, they and the capitalists, who have sprung from their avarice and
their philosophy, and largely from their very loins, have been completely
masters of England.
Here the reader may say: "What! this large national movement to be
interpreted as the work of such minorities? A few thousand squires and
merchants backing a few more thousand enthusiasts, changed utterly the mass
of England?" Yes; to interpret it otherwise is to read history backwards.
It is to think that England then was what England later became. There
is no more fatal fault in the reading of history, nor any illusion to
which the human mind is more prone. To read the remote past in the light
of the recent past; to think the process of the one towards the other
"inevitable;" to regard the whole matter as a slow inexorable process,
independent of the human will, still suits the materialist pantheism of our
time. There is an inherent tendency in all men to this fallacy of reading
themselves into the past, and of thinking their own mood a consummation
at once excellent and necessary: and most men who write of these things
imagine a vaguely Protestant Tudor England growing consciously Protestant
in the England of the Stuarts.
That is not history. It is history to put yourself by a combined effort of
reading and of imagination into the shoes of Tuesday, as though you did
not know what Wednesday was to be, and then to describe what Tuesday was.
England did not lose the Faith in 1550-1620 because she was Protestant
then. Rather, she is Protestant now because she then lost the Faith.
Put yourself into the shoes of a sixteenth century Englishman in the midst
of the Reformation, and what do you perceive? A society wholly Catholic in
tradition, lax and careless in Catholic practice; irritated or enlivened
here and there by a few furious preachers, or by a few enthusiastic
scholars, at once devoted to and in terror of the civil government;
intensely national; in all the roots and traditions of its civilization,
Roman; impatient of the disproportion of society, and in particular of
economic disproportion in the religious aspect of society, because the
religious function, by the very definition of Catholicism, by its very
Creed, should be the first to redress tyrannies. Upon that Englishman comes
first, a mania for his King; next, a violent economic revolution, which, in
many parts, can be made to seem an approach to justice; finally, a national
appeal of the strongest kind against the encroaching power of Spain.
When the work was done, say by 1620, the communication between England and
those parts of the ancient West, which were still furiously resisting the
storm, was cut. No spiritual force could move England after the Armada and
its effect, save what might arise spontaneously in the many excited men
who still believed (they continued to believe it for fifty years) that the
whole Church of Christ had gone wrong for centuries; that its original
could be restored and that personal revelations were granted them for their
guidance.
These visionaries were the Reformers; to these, souls still athirst for
spiritual guidance turned. They were a minority even at the end of the
sixteenth century, the last years of Elizabeth, but they were a minority
full of initiative and of action. With the turn of the century (1600-1620)
the last men who could remember Catholic training were very old or dead.
The new generation could turn to nothing but the new spirit. For authority
it could find nothing definite but a printed book: a translation of the
Hebrew Scriptures. For teachers, nothing but this minority, the Reformers.
That minority, though remaining a minority, leavened and at last controlled
the whole nation: by the first third of the seventeenth century Britain was
utterly cut off from the unity of Christendom and its new character was
sealed. The Catholic Faith was dead.
The governing class remained largely indifferent (as it still is) to
religion, yet it remained highly cultured. The populace drifted here, into
complete indifference, there, into orgiastic forms of worship. The middle
class went over in a solid body to the enemy. The barbarism of the outer
Germanies permeated it and transformed it. The closer-reasoned, far
more perverted and harder French heresy of Calvin partly deflected the
current--and a whole new society was formed and launched. That was the
English Reformation.
Its effect upon Europe was stupendous; for, though England was cut off,
England was still England. You could not destroy in a Roman province the
great traditions of municipality and letters. It was as though a phalanx
of trained troops had crossed the frontier in some border war and turned
against their former comrades. England lent, and has from that day
continuously lent, the strength of a great civilized tradition to forces
whose original initiative was directed against European civilization and
its tradition. The loss of Britain was the one great wound in the body of
the Western world. It is not yet healed.
Yet all this while that other island of the group to the Northwest of
Europe, that island which had never been conquered by armed civilization
as were the Outer Germanies, but had spontaneously accepted the Faith,
presented a contrasting exception. Against the loss of Britain, which had
been a Roman province, the Faith, when the smoke of battle cleared off,
could discover the astonishing loyalty of Ireland. And over against this
exceptional province--Britain--now lost to the Faith, lay an equally
exceptional and unique outer part which had never been a Roman province,
yet which now remained true to the tradition of Roman men; it balanced the
map like a counterweight. The efforts to destroy the Faith in Ireland have
exceeded in violence, persistence, and cruelty any persecution in any part
or time of the world. They have failed. As I cannot explain why they have
failed, so I shall not attempt to explain how and why the Faith in Ireland
was saved when the Faith in Britain went under. I do not believe it capable
of an historic explanation. It seems to me a phenomenon essentially
miraculous in character, not generally attached (as are all historical
phenomena) to the general and divine purpose that governs our large
political events, but directly and specially attached. It is of great
significance; how great, men will be able to see many years hence when
another definite battle is joined between the forces of the Church and her
opponents. For the Irish race alone of all Europe has maintained a perfect
integrity and has kept serene, without internal reactions and without their
consequent disturbances, the soul of Europe which is the Catholic Church.
I have now nothing left to set down but the conclusion of this disaster:
its spiritual result--an isolation of the soul; its political result--a
consequence of the spiritual--the prodigious release of energy, the
consequent advance of special knowledge, the domination of the few under
a competition left unrestrained, the subjection of the many, the ruin of
happiness, the final threat of chaos.
BELLOC-Europe and the Faith - VII: THE MIDDLE AGES