The Reformed Christian Body Politic
The Reformation, like most significant events in the history of ideas, is best understood as a collection of circumstances, persons, and thoughts that culminated in a series of changes. While it is not easy to say exactly the date of the beginning or the end of the Reformation, there are a few seminal moments that make this historical appellation meaningful. This is especially true for Christian political theory: the Reformation marks the rejection of significant portions of the total synthesis of universal Christianity and politics in the Christian West that we called the Medieval Christian Body Politic.
The Reformation was not the first time in Western Christianity that doctrines rejected by Rome gained a large following. In fact, there had been groups of Christians throughout Western medieval history that had engaged in small and large rejections of Catholic dogma. The difference during the Reformation was a matter scale and the embrace of the rebellion from Rome by several key political actors. The Reformation can be understood under four main heads of theological agreement among Protestants that resulted in four different political theories and expressions: Lutheran Principalities, Calvinist Genevan Republicanism, Anglican Monarchical Divine Right, and Radical Anabaptist anarchy. Before we think about these expressions, we need to examine the last period of the Medieval Body Politic just prior to the Reformation and the pathologies that presaged its dissolution.
Renaissance
We described the Medieval Body Politic as concerned with exploring the implications of Christian theology and philosophy down to the finest details. This project led to the significant social reforms that transformed late classical slavery among laborers and artisans into the medieval agrarian peasants and trade guilds in new European urban centers like Paris. This newly urban civilization began to develop another cultural institution characteristic of advanced societies: liberal universities and the intellectual culture that accompanies them. It is erroneous to say that classical learning was lost completely during the Dark Ages (c. AD 400–1100), but the communities capable of preserving, transmitting, and adding knowledge were isolated and threatened by the assault on society from invading barbarians. Most of this work could only be carried on in monasteries. Finally, with the institutional consolidation described in the last period (c. AD 1100-1300), the climate for cultural extension emerged in Western Europe.
The cultural expansion that occurred during this period (c. AD 1300-1600) has been called the Renaissance, which reflects the proliferation of classical, especially Greek, learning that occurred during this period and the arts that this new learning fostered. It is an oversimplification to suggest that the Renaissance was a rejection of the Medieval Body Politic in favor of classical ideas, but the medieval system of knowledge indeed was challenged and forced to respond.
Ecclesiastical Corruption
While the Protestant and Catholic sides of the Reformation controversy disagreed about the theological necessity of Church reform in the early sixteenth century, both sides agreed that the Church had fallen into a state of low morality and administrative corruption. Ecclesiastical rents were part of the administration of medieval political institutions; by the time of the late fifteenth century, these rents were being abused widely. Rents remained at rates that had been established during conditions of plenty decades prior and were not lowered during shortages, making the effective rate of taxation much too high. Ecclesiastical endowments were consolidated into multiplicities under the same person and used as choice means of political payoff that left local parishes lacking necessary clerical support. This happened in many bishoprics, and ecclesiastical administration suffered in those districts far removed from the actual home of their titular bishops. In short, there was evidence and an even greater perception that the Church had become a scheme for collecting profits for the worldly aggrandizement of its officers rather than the spiritual nourishment of the laity.
Clerical Degeneration
In tandem with the fiscal corruption just discussed, the education of the clergy was at a very low tide at this point in Western history. The Church was universal and in need of huge numbers of priests. During purer periods, the ecclesiastical organization had done a better job in its education of priests, but the financial corruption of ecclesiastical offices had led to a reduced zeal for clerical education.
Papal Problems
Finally, the papacy had undergone some significant challenges to the perception of its holiness and credibility. Following the consolidation of papal authority and institutional bureaucracy that resulted from the Investiture Controversy, the Pope had emerged as an important civil prince as well as ecclesiastical sovereign. Catholics argue that this was necessary to keep the papacy free from the meddling of the German Holy Roman Emperor or the French kings, who had successfully influenced the removal of the papacy to Avignon in southern France from AD 1309 – 1378. After returning from Avignon, the popes had consolidated their control of the Papal States in Italy, and to maintain their freedom, they were in the political practice of playing one European king off against the others.
As a result of these political maneuvers, the European kings and their propagandists began to describe the pope as an Italian prince. It is undeniably true that during this period some flamboyant Italian nobles gained the papal throne, and their political actions were used as evidence for the rejection of the papal ecclesiastical claims. With these problems in mind, we can now turn to the various expressions of Protestant separation from papal authority.
Luther
Martin Luther’s theological protest in the 95 Theses (AD 1517) is widely considered the beginning of the Reformation. Luther himself had been an Augustinian monk and professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg. He described himself as a restless Catholic, and his teaching at the University was provocative and highly publicized. Eventually his dissent from orthodoxy gained papal notice, and he was commanded to recant by the papal bull Exsurge Domine (Arise O Lord). His refusal to recant led to his trial before the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms, the general assembly of the estates of the Holy Roman Empire. Luther's local noble protectors gained him safe passage, and his ideas were put into action by the same princes.
Ecclesiastical partnership with the local magistrate is the hallmark of Lutheran political theory. Luther was delivered from punishment by Frederick III, the Elector of Saxony and German prince. The various German electors held the right at this time to determine the choice of the Holy Roman Emperor. Frederick, whatever his theological opinions, saw in Luther a justification for breaking with the political authority of the centralized powers of the Empire and papacy.
Lutheran Germany
Lutheran Germany was the federation of German provinces that broke from the Germanic Holy Roman Empire. While they agreed on dissociation from the Empire and the papal church, they maintained local sovereignty. However, it would be a mistake to characterize the Lutheran provinces as tolerant of religious pluralism; that condition was not to arise for quite a while. The German Lutheran princes were plagued by the same peasant uprisings that had occurred in protest against imperial centralization. They had no intention of allowing full religious and political liberty, but only freedom from papal religion and imperial control. The brutal repression of peasant revolts, often led by radical Anabaptists, who wanted complete religious and political freedom, confirm this commitment to state enforced religion in Lutheran territories. This Lutheran federation of principalities remained a distinct expression of post Reformation Christian political theory that was later copied in several northern European nations, especially Scandinavia.
Swiss Reformed Republicanism
The cities of Switzerland and northern Italy enjoyed a large degree of independence and self-rule throughout the Middle Ages; this region’s cities were especially insular due to their mountainous geography. As we noted earlier, feudalism was characteristic for its large degree of localism, and the urban civilization took a long time to develop. This region retained a large degree of feudal localism into the late medieval period. While major centralized kingdoms were forming at London, Paris, and the imperial German courts, the Swiss and northern Italian city-republics had maintained republican institutions, and several Swiss cities, notably Geneva and Zurich, exercised these republican institutions to embrace the republican Reformation expression of Christian political philosophy that came to be known later as Calvinist republicanism.
Calvin
John Calvin, born c. AD 1509, was the son of a minor lay ecclesiastical official in northern France. His father had intended him for the priesthood, but he moved his son into a course of legal studies following a administrative disagreement with his clerical superiors. Following his studies, Calvin produced a commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia; this type of scholarship was typical of the broad expansion of humanistic classicism prevalent following the Renaissance. Judging by this work, Calvin seemed destined for an academic life, but following his sudden conversion to the new religious principles that rejected papal authority and Catholic religious institutions, Calvin began a life of practical political engagement. He was sought by French authorities for his advocacy of Reformation principles and he moved frequently while composing the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion. It was the notice that he attracted from the release of this work that would lead to his invitation from the reforming party at Geneva to help consolidate its movement away from Roman authority. The religious and political institutions that Calvin helped establish at Geneva were direct applications of his theology and political philosophy as expressed in The Institutes.
In the Institutes, Calvin performed a comprehensive critique of the Roman Church’s institutions. He suggested, both explicitly and implicitly, that the Church had been perverted from its original mission to spread the Gospel; this perversion, according to Calvin, occurred when the Roman religious authority usurped an undue influence over the western churches that it consolidated in the sacramental system with its seven mandatory elements: baptism, confirmation, communion, confession, matrimony, holy orders, and last rites. Calvin, going a step further than Luther, argued that the Mass, the liturgy of the Eucharist, is not a sacrifice and that the ministry of the church is one of preaching not priesthood. Since preaching, not the Eucharist was to be the focus of Calvin’s religion, long and rigorous sermons were to be the norm; while communion was retained, it was significantly de-ritualized and its character as only a holy meal was stressed. Although he minimized the institution of most of the other Catholic sacraments, Calvin retained baptism in its strongest traditional usage: infant baptism. While Calvin argued for the removal of the priestly office and an increase in the importance of the individual as a minister of the Gospel, he was firmly in favor of the civil establishment and enforcement of Christianity religion.
Calvin had been invited by the public sentiment of republican Geneva. Geneva had been a bishopric in the medieval synthetic understanding of the combined civil and ecclesiastical bishop’s duties that had been formalized following the Investiture Conflict. Like many Swiss cities, Geneva was characteristically independent minded, and it is not surprising that the Reformation, as a political as well as religious revolt from central authority, was well received there. The Genevans expelled their Catholic bishop in AD 1536 and declared a formal republic. Several prominent Reformation preachers, including Guillaume Farel, invited Calvin to Geneva to help consolidate religious and political transformation. Together they established a republican city council and religious consistory, a court of doctrine elected by church members. While the town was officially republican and public decisions ostensibly reflected the will of the majority, it is hard to overstate Calvin’s political and religious influence on Geneva in this period.
French Calvinism: the Huguenots
The case of Calvinism in France provides a fascinating look at the various elements swirling in this period of religious and political upheaval. France was one of the big three Christian kingdoms of the period and had all of the characteristics of the late Medieval Body Politic: a powerful, centralized monarchy; a parliamentary body that represented the three estates of the realm (clergy, lords, commons); several major urban areas with advanced economic and cultural institutions; and an ecclesiastical establishment generally seen as degraded from its primary spiritual mission. The monarchy had been at war with the German Emperor and his relatives in Spain; during this conflict, King Francis I had made common cause with Pope Clement VII. The papacy was fighting the old cause against the imperial court that we have discussed at length. The injection of Calvinism into this environment caused a religious civil war.
Calvinism, ascendant in Geneva under Calvin’s direction, had begun to consolidate. Calvin’s systematic treatise on religion had given his dogma rigor and consistency. Under this theological standardization, Calvinism, as an identifiable and coherent system, had begun to radiate into areas that previously had shown sympathy with the rejection of Roman religious authority; this growth was consolidated further by the formal organization of a synod for the new Calvinist churches in France. The French people were split fairly evenly between supporters of the Catholic Church and Calvinism; while there was a later geographical sorting into Catholic and Huguenot Calvinist cities, most cities, including Paris, had large Calvinist coteries. Although the French monarchy, under Francis, vacillated between tolerance and persecution of the new religion, the Crown eventually took the official line of persecution and a series of armed tumults, chaos, and bloodshed commenced that convulsed French society for the next forty years. Eventually a workable solution was found in the Edict of Nantes (1598): French Calvinism would be legally recognized, but the most important political regions, including Paris, would remain Catholic; this stopped the bloodshed temporarily, but the religious discontent in France did not end.
Dutch Calvinism and the Revolt from Spain
The Netherlands had been an important commercial center for the Germanic Holy Roman Empire. Its coastal geography and several navigable rivers made it an important shipping lane for trade with Britain and the Scandinavian areas. Its distance from the center of imperial authority made the Netherlands another instance of the independent spirit we noted in the free Swiss cities. Again, these factors, as in the Swiss case, made the Netherlands a likely place for the political principles of the Reformation. The decisive moment came when several Dutch cities, influenced theologically by Calvinism and Lutheranism from neighboring France and the northern German principalities, declared their independence from the Catholic Spanish monarch, Philip II. The Austrian Hapsburgs, the family that controlled the Holy Roman Empire at the time, had gained the Spanish crown by marriage and succession, and the imperial rule of the Netherlands had been passed to the Spanish branch of the family. As we have already discussed, the Empire was in a political contest with the French kings and the papacy, and it had been using the wealthy Netherlands as a tax base to support is operations. The Dutch chaffed at this taxation and the combination of factors led to the successful break from Spanish control; this was an important development for the later developments in the English portion of the Reformation political history. The entrance of the English onto the stage of the Reformation struggle marks the second act in the formation of the Reformed Body Politic.
England: Henry VIII
The early Christian missionaries to Britain, operating in the late imperial Roman period, brought the Gospel, and the rudiments of a Christian Body Politic began to form as the various tribal kingdoms consolidated and Christianized; this process was disrupted by the series of pagan Scandinavian invasions that occurred in the seventh and eighth centuries. While the process was disrupted, it was not halted as the Scandinavian conquerors were themselves converted. Whatever native synthesis would have developed was greatly accelerated by the Norman Conquest under William in 1066; he brought with him the Carolingian civilization of continental Western Europe. England was dominated by this Norman/French political class until it declined into a series of civil wars among the various branches of the royal family, which ultimately culminated in the Tudor dynasty and Henry VIII.
Henry, originally trained for ecclesiastical office as the younger son of King Henry VII, was notable in his youth for his scholarship and political skill. He had been awarded a papal recognition as “Defender of the Faith” for the treatise he oversaw in opposition to the various continental Reformation challenges to the Catholic faith. Additionally, he was an important ally of the Empire and the pope in its struggle against the French monarchy. His marriage to Catherine of Aragon, a member of the imperial family that controlled the Catholic portions of Germany and Spain, was an important consolidation of that political alliance. However helpful Henry had been to the Catholic cause in his youth, he proved to be a disaster to that effort in later life. His desire for a divorce from Catherine, and the papal refusal to sanction it, led to the religious and political severing of the English crown from the papacy.
Like the Lutheran cases, in the English break from the papacy, the prince became the center of the religious authority in addition to the political sovereignty. However, unlike the Lutheran princes, the English Crown was much more centralized, and the English king was one of the great rulers of late medieval Europe, not just a regional noble like the Lutheran princes. In the English case, we have something truly unique: a highly centralized political authority that has annexed not only the authority to appoint religious officers, but also the authority to decide questions of doctrine; this was as if the French king or German emperor had decided to issue proclamations on Christian doctrine. The breakaway German principalities and Swiss city-republics were not fundamental challenges to Christian political theory in the same way that England was. The king, as the supreme religious head, asserted the right to control the physical wealth of the church in England and many religious institutions, starting a period of turmoil in English religious and political history that was not resolved until the Glorious Revolution ended with parliamentary installation of a German Protestant prince, William of Orange, as king, which signaled parliament’s ascendancy and the end of any legal possibility of a Catholic England.
Setting the Stage for the Modern State
The religious and political turmoil begun by the Reformation took a long time to settle. It was not until the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the European Wars of Religion in 1648 and the English Act of Toleration in 1689 that an official policy of religious tolerance began to gain acceptance. As it became clear to rulers and citizens that religious plurality was the new reality, political philosophers began to develop theories of how states could meet these new challenges in an arrangement that we will call the Early Modern Body Politic.
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