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Yet the transition from the monastery to marketplace exposed these reforming movements to precisely the dangers, threats, and problems that had led to the emergence of the monastic movement in the first place. Monasticism recognized the dangers of contamination of faith by political power, financial privilege, and being part of the cultural establishment. Monasticism withdrew from the world, in order to maintain its spiritual and religious purity. So how could the urbanized forms of Christianity that emerged from the Reformation maintain their spiritual integrity, when they existed in such a close relationship with the power structures of the imperial cities?
The negotiation of the boundaries between the spiritual and secular became an increasingly important theme in the forms of spirituality that emerged from the reforming movements in Germany and Switzerland. This contrasted sharply with the dominant themes of medieval spirituality. In some ways, the movement generally known as the Devotio Moderna (“Modern Devotion”) can be seen as anticipating themes later linked with the Reformation, such as the affirmation of the spiritual importance of the laity. Perhaps the most famous work to emerge from this school is Thomas à Kempis’ De imitatione Christi, written around 1425. The full title of this work, in English, is On the Imitation of Christ and Contempt for the World. A positive response to Jesus Christ is here presented as entailing a negative response to the world. For à Kempis, cultivating a detached or negative attitude toward the world was a mark of spiritual maturity and a precondition for spiritual growth. To “take up the cross” was to renounce the world.
The forms of spirituality which emerged from reforming movements in Germany and Switzerland had little sympathy for such an ethos of disconnection and detachment. Despite divergences on points of detail, Luther and Calvin insisted that Christianity belonged in the everyday world; there was no sound theological basis for a distinction between the “spiritual” and “temporal” realms (see p. 183). All Christians are called to be priests, and that calling extends to the everyday world. They are called to purify and sanctify its everyday life from within. Luther stated this point succinctly: “What seem to be secular works are actually the praise of God and represent an obedience which is well pleasing to him.”
This is often presented as a secularization of the sacred; while there is some truth in this, it is important to realize that early reforming writers saw this more in terms of the sacralization of the everyday world, in that activities traditionally regarded as lacking any spiritual role or significance came to be invested with religious value. The Protestant work ethic, now too often misunderstood simply as the affirmation of the value of productive labor, was more fundamentally about the discernment of the spiritual value of working in the home and the world, which was often framed as a form of worship and witness.
This point is brought out clearly by the English Protestant poet George Herbert in the early seventeenth century. Herbert is noted for his ability to transpose the leading themes of the Protestant reformation into poetic diction. For Herbert, the performance of even a menial action in the service of God endows it with significance and value.4
A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
Makes that and the action fine.
The key point here is that the Reformation articulated a way of thinking – and consequently a way of living – which affirmed the importance of everyday life, turning what might be seen as the mundane into acts of service and witness.
Up to this point, we have focused on some positive aspects of the new ways of thinking – which Luther and Calvin carefully depicted as a recovery of older and more authentic ways of thinking – introduced by the Reformation. We now turn to consider an aspect of late medieval religious culture which prepared the way for the Reformation in a more negative way. In what follows, we shall consider the widespread confusion at this time about what the church actually taught about certain questions – including the issue of what was required in order to be saved.
Doctrinal Confusion: A Crisis of Authority Within the Church
One of the most significant features of medieval religious thought is the growth of “schools” of theology in universities and monasteries. Each of these schools of thought took significantly different positions on a number of major theological questions, including the doctrine of justification (to which we shall return in Chapter 7) – such as what the individual had to do in order to be justified.
So which of these schools of thought was right? Which corresponded most closely to the official teaching of the church? In the late fifteenth century, there was widespread confusion over what was merely “theological opinion” and what was “Catholic dogma.” Nobody could be quite sure exactly what the official teaching of the church was on certain matters – including its teachings on what people needed to do in order to be sure of their salvation.
An episode from the late Italian Renaissance illustrates this point particularly well. During the first decade of the sixteenth century, a small group of young Italian noblemen met regularly, in order to discuss matters of religion. The members of this group shared a common concern: how to ensure the salvation of their souls. But how could this be done? What did they have to do in order to be saved? There appeared to be no obvious answer.
A crisis developed within the group, culminating in 1510. The group split into two sections. One group, convinced that salvation could come about only by a rejection of the world and personal denial, withdrew to a local monastery, there to work out their salvation safe from the influences of a fallen world. The second group chose to remain in the world. Somehow, they reasoned, it must be possible to remain in the world and attain salvation. But nobody was entirely sure of the official position of the church on this major question – an issue which Luther addressed head-on in his doctrine of justification by faith.
Confusion over the official teaching of the church on justification contributed in no small manner to the origins of Luther’s program of reform in Germany. The most recent known authoritative pronouncement on the part of a recognized ecclesiastical body relating to this doctrine dated from 418, and its confused and outdated statements did little to clarify the position of the church on the matter in 1518, eleven hundred years later. It seemed to Luther that the church of his day had lapsed into Pelagianism (see pp. 82–3), an unacceptable understanding of how an individual entered into fellowship with God. The church, Luther believed, taught that individuals could gain favor and acceptance in the sight of God on account of their personal achievements and status, thus negating the whole idea of grace.
Luther may well have been mistaken in this apprehension – but there was so much confusion within the church of his day that no one was able to enlighten him on the authoritative position of the church on the matter. We can speak of a spectrum of thought within the late Middle Ages. A remarkably wide range of doctrines was in circulation, and it was not always clear which were “official doctrine” of the church.
It is all too easy for twentieth-century writers, with the benefit of hindsight, to recognize the potential dangers for the religious establishment of the ideas being developed by the first reformers – but at the time these ideas attracted little attention from the official defenders of orthodoxy. The boundary lines between what was orthodox and what was not became so hopelessly confused that it was virtually impossible to treat individuals such as Luther as heretical – and by the time this move became necessary, the Reformation had gained such momentum that it proved difficult to obstruct it. The scene for a future religious confrontation was set by the doctrinal pluralism of the late medieval church.
It is interesting to note that early Catholic criticisms of Luther failed to pick up on the importance of his doctrine of justification by faith alone. Most critics of Luther in the early 1520s portrayed him as repeating the discredited ideas of John Wycliffe and Jan Hus that were subsequently condemned by the Council of Constance. Very few