Autor: Gregory, Brad S.

Buch: The Unintended Reformation

Titel: The Unintended Reformation

Stichwort: Mittelalter, Reformation; Scheitern des mittelalterlichen Christentums: Versagen nach den Wahrheitsansprüchen d. Christentums zu leben

Kurzinhalt: ... medieval Christendom failed, the Reformation failed, confessionalized Europe failed, and Western modernity is failing, but each in different ways ... the failure of medieval Christendom was not a function of the ... demonstrable falsity of truth ...

Textausschnitt: CONCLUSION
Against Nostalgia

365a Judged on their own terms and with respect to the objectives of their own leading protagonists, medieval Christendom failed, the Reformation failed, confessionalized Europe failed, and Western modernity is failing, but each in different ways and with different consequences, and each in ways that continue to remain important in the present. This sums up the argument of the book. To be sure, the genealogical method employed is expandable, and more comprehensive accounts are possible. Additional domains of human life have scarcely been mentioned that could have been analyzed in the same manner—sex, marriage, and families, for example, or forms of communication—by tracing their long-term transformations over time from the late Middle Ages to the present, with particular attention paid to the impact of the Reformation era. Nevertheless, the six chapters as they stand explain much about how the contemporary Western world came about, and how the Reformation era continues to influence it. As was stated in the Introduction, my intent in treating the subjects of the respective chapters discretely was strictly analytical. No domain of life was lived in isolation from the others. Along the way, I have referred to some of their points of overlap and intersection while trying to avoid burdening the exposition with too many cross-references. Still, the work’s structure and method risk leaving a mistaken impression that these are six separate stories, rather than an analysis of human realities that were lived together in a tangled, temporal succession by historical protagonists frequently unaware of where their actions would lead. That is how all human life is lived. The principal aim of this conclusion is to sketch briefly a narrative picture of the whole based on the six chapters taken together, to note some of its implications, and to make a suggestion about contemporary academic discourse. (Fs)

366a Alexandra Walsham has recently written that because of the manner in which long-standing paradigms for understanding the Reformation “were themselves partly a deliberate product of [protagonists’] own propaganda, polemic, and retrospective, mythologizing rhetoric ... the task of writing a history of Protestantism with the notion of ‘progress’ left out remains a formidable one.”1 This book about the unintended Reformation and its multifarious, long-term influences over half a millennium would seem to qualify as such a history, even though it is much more than a conventional history of Protestantism. (Fs)

366b Despite contrary claims by those who espouse supersessionist conceptions of history or hold alternative beliefs about reality, the failure of medieval Christendom was not a function of the demonstrated or demonstrable falsity of central doctrinal truth claims of the Christian faith as promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church. Over the course of more than a millennium the church had gradually and unsystematically institutionalized throughout Latin Europe a comprehensive, sacramental worldview based on truth claims about God’s actions in history, centered on the incarnation, life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Intellectual life on the eve of the Reformation was vibrant if sometimes contentious, variously institutionalized not only in universities but also in monasteries, at princely courts and among participants in the “religious Republic of Letters.”2 Nor was the failure of medieval Christendom the result of the wide diversity of ways in which the faith was expressed from Scandinavia and Scotland to Sicily and Spain. An enforced uniformity of piety and religious practice was neither a medieval social fact nor even an ecclesiastical ideal. Much was left to lay discretion and initiative in the unprecedentedly devout fifteenth century. (Fs; tblStw: xy) (notabene)

366c The failure of medieval Christendom derived rather from the pervasive, long-standing, and undeniable failure of so many Christians, including members of the clergy both high and low, to live by the church’s own prescriptions and exhortations based on its truth claims about the Life Questions. It was at root a botching of moral execution, a failure to practice what was preached. Judged by the church’s own criteria—the extent to which Christians were holy and pursuing greater holiness by imitating Christ via the shared practice of the virtues in communities of faith—the concrete realities of late medieval Christendom as a whole were far from what Jesus had preached and distant from the church’s own ideals. Sins were everywhere. In one way or another, this is precisely what exercised so many committed reformers within the church from the eleventh into the early sixteenth century. How could the gulf between prescriptions and practices be narrowed, and human life be made more genuinely Christian? Late medieval Christianity was an institutionalized worldview, but one that by its own standards fell gravely short of having realized its own constantly repeated ideals, despite the self-flattering claims of those theologians who identified the church with the kingdom of God. Every domain of human life was adversely affected. Communities were hampered in their capacity to foster habituation into the virtues on which the individual good, the common good, and eternal salvation depended. In the fifteenth century, secular authorities from civic magistrates to royal sovereigns increasingly took ecclesiastical reform into their own hands in the absence of serious interest or initiative by most churchmen, and in light of the difficulties encountered by those ecclesiastical leaders who did take action. (Fs)

367a No less consequential than myriad sins by members of the clergy and laity were the widespread failures of secular and ecclesiastical authorities to find nonoppressive ways of exercising power consistent with caritas. The challenge was to use power in a manner that sought not simply to safeguard the common good (by maintaining and enforcing rules that are indeed necessary for the existence of moral communities), but also to foster within those communities the individual flourishing of the women and men who were created in God’s image and likeness. To the extent that caritas was indiscernible in the exercise of power, Christianity might well have seemed simply a noxious ideology wielded for the purpose of ensuring order in a hierarchical society of ranks and stations. This awareness among the church’s late medieval critics did not have to wait for the modern invention of sociology or political science as academic disciplines. The naturalization of socioeconomic hierarchy in a preindustrial but monetized economy of relative scarcity, an economy increasingly permeated by market practices, was taken to justify enormous discrepancies between rich and poor in ways that highlighted medieval Christianity’s central moral blindness. Without this obliviousness, the early Reformation’s most conspicuous and disruptive popular manifestation, the Peasants’ War of the mid-1520s, might never have happened. In the later Middle Ages and into the sixteenth century, not only oligarchic, aristocratic, and royal secular authorities but also the highest-ranking ecclesiastical authorities enjoyed power, privilege, possessions, and money, which seem only rarely to have been used in genuinely self-denying ways that expressed the virtues and sought the good of those beyond families and friends. (Fs)