Liberty and Property. Ellen Wood

REFORMATION

      Martin Luther is one of very few, even among canonical thinkers, for whom a persuasive case can be made that, had he never been born, history would not have unfolded as it did. He may, for this reason alone, seem to present a special challenge to a social-contextual history like this one. If the ideas of one man can seem to change the course of history in such dramatic ways, must we not reconsider the primacy of discourse? Yet to ask the question in this way would be to misunderstand what is entailed by the kind of contextualization proposed in this book. Whatever doubts we may have about the decisive role of this or that historic figure, the social history of political theory does not require us to denigrate the creativity or world-historic influence of individuals. It does not oblige us to think that a Protestant movement would have emerged more or less in the form that it did with or without Martin Luther, nor does it suggest that if Martin Luther had never existed he would have had to be invented, or, for that matter, that Protestantism had no significant effects on the truly ‘basic’ processes of history.

      How, then, should we pose the question? We shall certainly want to ask how the particularities of Luther’s time and place shaped the particular configuration of problems he sought to resolve; and we shall want to consider how it came about that the same ideas were mobilized so differently, to such divergent purposes, in different contexts. But in the case of Luther more than most other thinkers, we are compelled to ask how a conceptual shift in the realm of ideas could have had such massive historical consequences; and it may turn out that the greater the world-historic effects we claim for Luther’s ideas, the more – not the less – we must appeal to a contextual explanation.

      The Roots of Reformation

      Some historians have questioned the very existence of a Reformation conceived as a radical discontinuity in Christian dogma and reactions to it. The ideas of Luther and other major Protestant thinkers, they point out, were deeply rooted in the medieval Church, which was already alive with debate and projects for internal reformation; and there had long been heresies to challenge the institutions, no less than the theological orthodoxies, of the Catholic Church. Conflicts in the Church had been vastly aggravated by geopolitical rivalries among rising territorial states, as the papacy at Avignon had increasingly come under the influence of the French monarchy, and competing papal claimants in Avignon and Rome became embroiled in inter-state rivalries between France and its European neighbours. In the late fourteenth century, these rivalries produced the so-called Western Schism, which would last for decades and helped to generate a climate of reform and outright heresy.

      The conciliar movement, which flourished in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, elaborated the idea that it was not the pope but the corporate body of Christians in the form of a general Church council that held ultimate authority in spiritual matters. While the movement would give way to a revived papal dominance, its influence remained alive, even if more as a model for secular theories of constitutional government than as a programme for reform of the Church. More scathing attacks on the papacy, as well as on the abuses and corruptions of the Church, would come from the Englishman John Wycliffe (1330–84) and, most importantly, from the Bohemian Jan Hus (1369–1415), whose influence on Luther would run very deep. Both Wycliffe and Hus denied that the ecclesiastical hierarchy, from pope to cardinals to priests, constituted the Church; and both called on secular rulers to initiate reform of the Church. They even demanded that ecclesiastical possessions should be subject to secular rule, on the grounds that the Church did not enjoy ownership but only use rights conditional on good behaviour.

      Renaissance humanism, too, played a critical part. Indeed, there may be something artificial about distinguishing the ‘Reformation’ from ‘Christian humanism’. The humanist preoccupation with ancient texts would be extended to the Bible, encouraging theologians to mobilize scripture in challenging the current practices of ecclesiastical authorities. The spread of printing, needless to say, gave a new force to this kind of textual challenge. Christian humanism, especially in the person of Erasmus, may have remained committed to internal reform of the Church and deeply suspicious of the Lutheran ‘reformation’; but it also encouraged, if not necessarily outright anti-clericalism, at least the subjection of Church rituals and orthodoxies to critical scrutiny and the moral judgment of the individual. All these challenges to clerical authority, both Christian humanist and ‘Protestant’, would at the same time, directly or by implication, affect attitudes towards the powers of secular rulers.

      Ideas such as these – not only criticism of the Church and its abuses but also, and not least, the elevation of secular authority – would be central to the Reformation. Yet even if we acknowledge that the institutions of the Church were in the end resistant to the necessary changes, and even if we treat Luther’s ideas as a profoundly revolutionary transformation in theology, the magnitude of the Lutheran rupture seems incommensurate with the novelty of his theology. There is also a massive disparity – which, of course, there often is with major thinkers but which, in Luther’s case, is particularly striking – between the meaning or intentions of his doctrine and the direction of the changes that emerged in its wake. It will be argued in what follows that the scale and consequences of the break had less to do with the originality and revolutionary import or intent of Luther’s ideas than with the geopolitical and social conflicts into which they were drawn.

      That Luther challenged some of the beliefs and practices of Roman Catholicism with drastic effect is beyond question, as is, needless to say, the separation of ‘Protestants’ – in all their various and often antithetical guises – from the Catholic Church. We shall look at the nature and implications of Luther’s challenge to medieval Catholicism, but Luther’s doctrine was something else too. Inextricably connected with his attacks on the Church, not only its corruptions but its very claims to jurisdiction, are his views on secular government. For all Luther’s occasionally stinging attacks on German princes, there hardly exists in the Western canon a more uncompromising case for strict obedience to secular authority; and this, as we shall see, belongs to the essence of Lutheran doctrine no less than does the attack on the medieval Church’s practice of indulgences or Luther’s idea of justification by faith.

      Yet, while this fundamental aspect of Protestant doctrine was certainly not lost on German princes or on European kings, it was also somehow transformed into its opposite, a doctrine of rebellion. The question, then, must be how such a rigid doctrine of obedience could have such revolutionary effects and, beyond that, how a doctrine that seems far better suited to defending than to challenging the supremacy of princely power could be transformed into a doctrine of resistance. The answer lies in specificities of context, which both impelled Luther to formulate his doctrine of obedience and also permitted it to be transformed into its opposite.

      Martin Luther

      If the sixteenth century was a period of rising territorial states in Western Europe, Germany, like Italy, represented an exception. While in other cases the crisis of feudalism had meant a growing challenge to parcellized sovereignty from centralizing monarchies, in Germany it gave new life to the fragmentation of governance. Feudal lordship may have given way to princely government, and the feudal powers of the lesser nobility may have been weakened; but German principalities and duchies vigorously resisted the kind of monarchical centralization that was taking place elsewhere in Western Europe and produced in its stead a new kind of parcellized sovereignty.

      In the Holy Roman Empire, which was the nearest thing to a national state in German territories, the emperor’s authority was severely and explicitly limited by the autonomous powers of local duchies, principalities and cities. In the thirteenth century, Frederick II – partly in a fruitless effort to maintain the presence of the Empire in northern Italy – had ceded even more powers to local German lords, including princes of the Church. Although German landed classes in the west were never able to consolidate their powers over peasants in a ‘second serfdom’ as their eastern counterparts would do, the Empire had effectively transformed them from feudal lords into local rulers, territorial princes with state-like powers of their own, not least the power to tax. This gave them access to increasing revenues from peasants, especially from more prosperous peasant farmers who, even while freed from feudal dependence, bore the greatest burden of taxation. This would become a major source of grievance in the peasant war of 1524–5.

      Secular authority