Did the Reformation Lead to ISIS?
BY MICHAEL MARINACCIO
The story must not be neglected by any modern, who may think in error that the East has finally fallen before the West, that Islam is now enslaved — to our political and economic power at any rate if not to our philosophy. It is not so. Islam essentially survives, and Islam would not have survived had the Crusade made good its hold upon the essential point of Damascus. Islam survives. Its religion is intact; therefore its material strength may return. Our religion is in peril, and who can be confident in the continued skill, let alone the continued obedience, of those who make and work our machines? … There is with us a complete chaos in religious doctrine…. We worship ourselves, we worship the nation; or we worship (some few of us) a particular economic arrangement believed to be the satisfaction of social justice…. Islam has not suffered this spiritual decline; and in the contrast between [our religious chaos and Islam’s] religious certitudes still strong throughout the Mohammedan world lies our peril.
The accuracy is astounding. Written in 1937, Hilaire Belloc writes what can only be described as an eerie foreshadowing of the times we now occupy. As Americans, we watch as refugees flee the Middle East and Europe accepts Islam into its midst. It is a frightening foil to the Crusades of times past. But yet, I cannot help but wonder as I watch, if Europe was still a unified Christian nation, would we be seeing a great conversion instead of a great Jihad?
Over Christmas I read a fantastic book by the same author entitled How the Reformation Happened. It brought together a slew of historical accounts that I was frankly ignorant of. The contents of the book should be no mystery. But the story of the dissolution of Catholicism in Europe was unlike how I had been taught and unlike how I had imagined.
The first thing we have to do in approaching our subject, if we are to get it in the right historical perspective, is to be rid of a certain illusion which the time and place in which we live naturally foster. It is the illusion that the Catholic Church lived in a peaceable, equal life of unquestioned power throughout the centuries between the conversion of the Roman Empire and the great catastrophe of the sixteenth century.
It did nothing of the sort. It lived in perpetual conflict, and in perpetual period, humanly speaking, of dissolution. It was perpetually under the assault of enemies from within and from without.
With acute and precise knowledge of history, Belloc paints a macabre picture of a disjointed European nation having just suffered under the Great Schism and the Black Death, now plunged headfirst into war with Turkish advances from the East.
Belloc is Catholic but he is not naive to Church corruption of the time. He cites how the Papacy had become increasingly Italian and nepotist (Popes related to Popes), rubbing the wrong way non-Italian European Princes who had gained tremendous local power after the Black Death “tore through the living structure of Christendom,” killing half of Western Europe in two years. It effectively destroyed central governing among the Kingdoms. He also notes the corruption of the Clergy, who had created a system of extorting the European aristocracy through indulgences and were subject to occasional scandals involving wives, mistresses, and illegitimate children.
But of all these failures from inside the Church, Belloc asserts that the greatest precursor to the Reformation, more important than any other, was the waning heart and moral fatigue of the European man — most especially the rich. The moral decay of the clergy (which is often held up as the Protestant’s greatest cause) was merely a reflection (as it often is) of the moral state of affairs in Europe. And it was creating a growing anxiety.
Luther’s actions came at a moment of perilous instability, and a wild enthusiasm seized not only the people of the place, but the great bodies of German folk. It was a confused enthusiasm, but its general inspiration was unmistakable. It was a violent reaction against the authority of Rome, and, mixed up with that revolt, all manner of other breakings out against all manner of other authority: the beginnings of a grumble which grew to a roar from the poor against the rich; the first incitements among the rich themselves towards the raiding of Church wealth, for which they were panting;
To Belloc, a revolution of any type was inevitable. The wave that would later be called “Protestant” merely fit the bill and Luther filled the role.
It was not theological debate which the debater on theology had let loose, it was Revolution: one more in the list of those foaming fits and seizures which fall at intervals upon mankind.
What was most surprising to me from this read was the lack of doctrinal disagreement that I had always assumed was absolutely critical to the Reformation.
The outstanding character of the process that went on for a full two hundred years before the Reformation was not the positive growth of a new doctrine, but the weakening of moral authority in the temporal and spiritual organization of the Church.
The truth was, that while the wave grew in 1517 from Luther’s ninety-five theses (all doctrinally defensible), it would not be until Henry VIII’s divorce in 1530 that a national government (England) would challenge the Vatican and not until 1536, with John Calvin’s Institute, that anyone would ascribe any fundamental philosophy to the movement ex post facto:
Men today think in terms of what they know was to come, they are interested in the origins of what became a religious civil war throughout Christendom. Because Mohammedanism is no longer a peril they forget what Mohammedan pressure was in the very years of the first violent quarrels within the religion of Europe, and the crying necessity in those years for that last Crusade which was never undertaken. In other words, our modern official historians make of the first violent commotion in the Germanies, something creative — which it was not; independent and externally caused, which it certainly was not, and affiliated to the later thing called Protestantism, which we now enjoy and of which the men of the time knew nothing and (had they known it) would have abhorred. Our historians are wrong: the commotion that was at first no more than a hubbub. What made it later lead to the final disruption of Europe was not any force in itself, but first Islam right upon us, and later, the folly of the Government in England. What gave it later the spirit called “Protestantism” was John Calvin’s book.
Belloc implies that, had the Protestant Reformation been founded on some disagreement in the theology, some moral philosophy to be made right; if it had finally “fixed” something doctrinally wrong with Christendom, then that “Protestantism,” ultimately made more beautiful, would have roared through the European countryside and the unification of the continent would have followed. For Europe, before, was indeed unified.
The Reformation did not continue the a direct Renaissance tendency towards larger things, it deflected that tendency. It did not introduce the arts, it cramped and thwarted them. Its last effects have not led to a society happy or stable, they have led to the society we see around us today.
It should strike us as unsettling that this was written in 1928 when Christianity was still fairly energetic in Europe. Had the Reformation been true and beautiful, shouldn’t we see doctrinally unified European nations proud of their cultural roots in Christian unity? Instead, Christianity has seen its last days.
On the other side, the power of Islam lies in its theological core: an unrelenting, actionable belief that the world not only should be but will be made Muslim. 500 years ago, European princes failed to hear the call of the Church to defend Christianity and, now, the garrisons no longer even exist to defend them. Both have led to an emboldening of their Jihad, an effort made stronger by the absence of a Christian authority in the world.
At home, Americans bicker over refugee policy and stoke fear, the worst effects of our Protestant emptiness, which has exacerbated the Islamic cause. Had the Reformation won the world for Christ, rather than dividing and conquering, the flood of Muslim refugees to Christian nations today would be greeted and saved by Christ’s harvesters in an evangelistic godsend.
Should our side have an actionable defense to the unrelenting force that is Islamic fundamentalism, it is a rigorous return to a faith that is more than just the smoke and mirrors Europe employed by accident. An accident that could not have been foreseen, and if it had, would we have even prevented it?
There is a strong tendency towards the error of regarding men in the past as aiming at what we now know to have been the fruit of their actions; though they themselves could have had no guess at such results, and though they would have been astonished and even appalled had they been told what the consequences would be. So it was with the men who began the Reformation.
It is not enough to lament that our fellow Christian brothers die at the hands of theological heretics. Without an intimate, foundational faith greater than the simple fear of such atrocities, the strength of theology that stands behind ISIS will defeat us; just as they almost did 500 years ago.
Our generation lives in a world where Catholic is the sole surviving positive force, where there surrounds that force a wide belt not Catholic, but in varying degrees of sympathy with Catholicism, while outside and beyond is a wreckage of philosophies inclining to despair.
Read: How the Reformation Happened by Hilaire Belloc.
