Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 371 - European Disunion - Introduction to the Reformation.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the University of London. The history of philosophy, like God, moves in mysterious ways. Actions and arguments may lead to the emergence of ideas that would surprise, even horrify, the people who first set things in motion. Every historical period offers examples. From the medieval era, a nice illustration would be how a theory of economic rights resulted from the insistence of religious mendicants that they should be allowed to embrace strict voluntary poverty. But for unintended consequences, you can't do much better than the Protestant Reformation. Consider what Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli would have said upon learning that their movement would indirectly give rise to theories of religious toleration, the strict separation of church and state, and arguably, even the widespread secularization of European political and cultural life. As if that weren't enough, they could also be informed that, thanks to their Reformation, Europe would soon be engulfed in decades of warfare. It's enough to make you think twice next time you nail a list of complaints to adore. Of course, the Reformation had its own prehistory. It was the culmination of developments in religious life that had been going on for generations. In the 14th and early 15th centuries, the Lollards in England and the Hussites in Bohemia already anticipated several items on the agenda of the 16th century reformers. These included doubts about the transformation of bread into the body of Christ in the Eucharist, dissemination of the scriptures in vernacular translation, and criticism of hypocrisy and corruption in the church. The right of lay persons to engage actively with religious issues, encapsulated in Luther's famous teaching that all believers are priests, was defended as far back as the 12th century by Peter Valdes of Lyon. He and his followers, the Waldensians, claimed the right to preach publicly without church authorization. They were met with violent repression, as were Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague, Bohemian reformers who were executed for their ideas. John Wickley Cliff, the central figure of the Lollard movement, avoided that fate but his books were burnt. These events were premonitions of what was to come, as the 16th century was marked by suppression of ideas and executions for heresy, and on both sides of the religious divide. Given this history, everyone should have expected the Spanish Inquisition. The 95 Theses Luther Nailed on a Church Door in Wittenberg in 1517 concerned the question of indulgences, payments made to the church to reduce the time one would have to spend in purgatory after death before ascending to heaven. The very belief in purgatory had been rejected by members of these earlier movements. Among those who did believe in it, it did not take deep immersion in theology to be annoyed when the church used indulgences to pay for new building projects, using slogans like, At the sound of the coin falling into the box, a soul flies to heaven. It was just a particularly egregious example of something that had been causing outrage throughout the medieval period, the staggering wealth of the church, and its involvement in secular affairs. The latter was something Luther categorically rejected, but he was hardly the first to do that. So what made him and the other reformers something new in the history of Christianity? The full answer to that question will be given in episodes to come, but for now we can mention a point that connects to the question of purgatory, Luther's doctrine of sin and grace. Again, his ideas on this topic fit into a long-standing debate, one that goes all the way back to Augustine in the 5th century AD. In his later works, he had vociferously refuted the ideas of Pelagius, who taught that humans can merit salvation by living virtuously. Against this, Augustine argued that the freely given grace of God is a prerequisite for liberation from sin and entry into paradise. In order to avoid the Pelagian heresy, later Christian thinkers always admitted the need for grace, but that left room for moral striving on the part of the believer. According to some theologians, for instance Gabriel Biel, humans could prepare themselves for the gift of grace through their own power. Biel's slogan was thus that believers should, Do what they have in them to do. Fakade quod in se est. Luther rejected that idea. For him, every step upon the road to salvation requires the support of God. Sinners as we are, we are not capable of meriting grace. We can only hope to receive it as an undeserved gift. Hence his contrary slogan that justification is only by faith, sola fide, not good works. Luther was clearly steering well clear of Pelagianism here, but his position raised other concerns. If it is up to God whether we are saved, why should we even make any effort to be good? And if the whole question of sin and redemption is decided by God's gratuitous choice to save an elect chosen from among the undeserving sinners, then why doesn't God save everyone? Which brings us to John Calvin and his Reformed church. Embracing outright the determinism that might seem to follow from Luther's teaching, they simply admitted that God predestines some to be saved, others to be damned. To meet the challenge of this potentially terrifying worldview, Catholic theologians, and also Protestants who did not wish to go quite so far, needed to articulate a more robust role for good works and well-intentioned effort on the part of humans. The upshot of all this is that the 16th century became a high point in a history of reflection on the problem of free will. And this is only the most obvious of several philosophical debates that grew immediately out of the thought of the founding fathers of the Reformation. As if all that were not complicated enough, the Reformation was only one of the three main ingredients that went into the stew that was European philosophy in the 15th and 16th centuries. Having already looked at the intellectual history of Italy in this same period, we can already guess at what the other two might be – humanism and scholasticism. Italian humanists like Bruni and Ficino were matched elsewhere in Europe by such figures as Rodolfus Agricola, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Erasmus, Juan Luis Vives, and Jacques Lefebvre de Tap. Meanwhile, scholasticism continued, and indeed thrived, in German and English universities, on the Iberian peninsula and in Paris, where innovators like Peter Rammus helped to make the broadly Aristotelian approach still relevant. All over Europe, schoolmen were carrying on the traditions of thought we associate with medieval figures like Aquinas, Scotus, and Occam, which with suitable adaptation could also win the allegiance of Protestants. In fact, as Charles Nowitt has written, scholasticism did not have the decency to turn up its toes and die, but in fact reasserted its dominance over the academic world in the middle and later decades of the 16th century, and remain powerful well into the 17th century. As in Italy, humanists and scholastics in other lands criticized one another in terms ranging from gentle teasing to full-throated polemic. For the humanists, the scholastics were pedants, whose overly abstract and technical approach was at best a waste of time, at worst a distraction from living a good and pious life. Agricola said that scholastic theology was nothing more than childish riddles, while Vivus complained about the effect of logic on religious thought in the following terms, Since this sort of invective is, if we're honest, quite fun, I'll indulge in quoting another passage from Vivus, This understanding of scripture was very much at issue once humanists like Erasmus and Lefebvre applied their philological and textual skills to the Bible itself. on the grounds that even a deep knowledge of classical languages makes one only a grammarian, not a theologian. Erasmus and other humanists met such accusations with the rather persuasive response that, in order to understand scripture, you should first establish a reliable original text and learn how to translate it. True, this would occasion changes in the way the holy book was understood. That was the whole point, after all, to understand the Bible more accurately than had been managed by the medieval's with their poor or non-existent command of Hebrew and Greek. Still, Erasmus dismissed the notion that such philological activity might undermine religion. There can be no danger that everybody will forthwith abandon Christ if the news happens to get out that some passage has been found in scripture which an ignorant or sleepy scribe has miscopied or some unknown translator has rendered inadequately. But as Erasmus well knew, changing a word here or there could indeed have a great significance for religious belief. He caused a stir when his edition of the New Testament left on the cutting floor a scriptural proof text for the Trinity. Not, he hastened to add, because he rejected the Trinitarian doctrine, but simply because this passage was inauthentic. In another case, he argued on linguistic grounds that passages used to encourage doing penance were in fact not about that at all, but about repenting. So this was not a command to, say, donate money to the church or recite prayers as instructed by a priest, but to engage in private reflection on one's sins. Here, a point of vocabulary offered support for the increasing tendency among both Catholics and Protestants to focus attention on individuals and their psychological states. It's something we can see in much literature of the period, from Shakespeare's Hamlet to the Book of Spiritual Exercises written by Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. Humanism was clearly a factor in the birth of the Reformation, though scholars debate exactly how important a factor. Certainly, the humanist's attention to the text of the Bible resonated with the Reformers' focus on that text as the true guide to proper belief, another idea that got its own slogan, sola scriptura, or by scripture alone. The Reformers also held that this was a book for all Christians, not only an elite brotherhood of priests. This could help to defuse the charges that the humanists lacked the theological training to understand the Bible. If scripture is straightforward enough to be suitable for the everyday believer, then the humanists should be able to interpret it without having studied theology for years at a university. Luther duly welcomed the work of Erasmus. He himself was no humanist, though he learned some Greek and a little Hebrew. But Luther joined with gusto in the mockery of the Scholastics, saying that Luther knew whereof he spoke, having enjoyed, not the word he would use, a Scholastic education as a young man. Looking back, he saw this formation as quite literally providential, but only because it deprived his enemies of the chance to say that he was ignorant about the target of his diatribes. Despite this overt hostility, many modern-day scholars have suspected that Scholasticism helped to shape Luther's thought. The brand of philosophy he learned at the University of Erfurt was the so-called Biermoderna, in other words the nominalism of figures like Occam and Beale. While this tradition was associated with the teachings on grace that he rejected, it was also committed to voluntarism, which seems to play a significant role in Luther's thought, given his emphasis on the unconstrained and arbitrary choice of God. But he also used more technical ideas he picked up during his studies, as when he applied the Scholastic theory of motion to describe the progress of the sinner towards redemption. The most important figure in early Lutheranism, aside of course from Luther himself, was Philipp Melanchthon. Among the leading reformers, Melanchthon is the one who could most uncontroversially be described as a philosopher in his own right. He was influenced by both humanism and scholasticism, the latter thanks to his training at Tübingen. He retained a strong interest in Aristotle and lectured on several of his works, even after joining Luther's movement. Yet he also paid due respect to the humanist's favorite classical author, Cicero, attacked the schoolmen, and blamed their inadequate theology on their ignorance of classical languages. Catholic thought in this period likewise drew on both humanism and scholasticism traditions that flourished in France and the Iberian peninsula, just as they did in Italy. In the Iberian context, we'll be paying particular attention to the work of scholastics at Salamanca and Coimbra, who belonged to either the Dominican or Jesuit orders. The Jesuits will be important to our story, in part because they counted among their numbers such luminaries as Luis de Molina and Francisco Suarez, and in part because of their role in what is sometimes called the Counter-Reformation, though many scholars now prefer to speak of a Catholic Reformation. Since its founding by Ignatius Loyola, who was himself from Spain, the Jesuits had laid great emphasis on education and individual spiritual development. Though the original purpose of the order was not to combat Protestantism, their approach put them in a good position to resist Protestant advances. This was a goal they pursued through sophisticated philosophical argumentation, and also the more practical measure of founding schools across Europe, including in Germany and Switzerland, the heartlands of the Reformation. The Jesuits were also involved in the attempt to export Christianity from Europe to more far-flung lands. Catholics were known to say that the loss of so many souls to Protestantism might be compensated by converts in Asia and the newly-contacted Americas. Speaking of geography, I need to explain something about the way I'll be structuring this series of episodes to come. It's been a long-standing feature of this podcast that I organized the material in terms of space as well as time. Thus, we looked at medieval philosophy in three distinct, albeit mutually interacting cultural spheres, moving from the largest of these, the Islamic world, onto Latin Christendom and then to Eastern Greek Christendom. More recently, we've been considering Italy, from roughly 1400 to 1600. As we turn to cover the rest of Europe in the same time period, I'm going to continue with this approach. We'll begin with the Low Countries Germany and Switzerland, where we'll explore the so-called Northern Renaissance and of course the rise of Protestantism. From there, we will turn to France, then England and Scotland, and finally Southern Europe, concentrating mostly on Spain and Portugal, with occasional trips to Italy. Our story will finish there, as we finish off the story of Galileo. You might want to get comfortable though, because I'll be devoting a dozen and more episodes to each of these regions. To mention just a few highlights of the first miniseries, our coverage of Central Europe and the Low Countries will feature such topics as Nicholas of Cusa, Erasmus, Luther, Copernicus, Protestant political theory, alchemy, and the subject of the next episode, which we'll look at the printing press and the revolution in intellectual culture it unleashed. After our tour of Reformation-era Europe, we will finally be ready to tackle the riches of the 17th and 18th centuries, the period we can loosely call Early Modern Philosophy. In my coverage of that later period, I am tentatively planning to repeat the pattern of a geographical round trip, by taking you from France and the Low Countries to Britain, and then to Germany. Though I think this should work fairly well, it must be admitted that philosophy has an inconvenient tendency to cross borders. As I cover one geographical space after another, I will often have to mention the influence of thinkers we haven't yet covered, as when philosophers in France are reading the works written in England. But that would be true no matter how I organized the material, because philosophy in early modern Europe was both prolific and interconnected. Scholars moved around, wrote letters to each other, and printed mutual refutations. Some thinkers resolutely refused to stay put, as if deliberately trying to cause problems from my geographical way of proceeding. Giordano Bruno is a good example. As you'll recall, he was from Italy, but passed through a number of cities, including the capital of Calvinism, Geneva, the French cities of Paris and Toulouse, and London and Oxford too. Indeed, one reason that there was a Northern Renaissance, and that Humanism played such a major role in the period across Europe, is that Italian scholars went abroad, and scholars from other European countries visited Italy. Erasmus stayed in both England and Italy, where he published a book with the famous Aldine Press. The humanist Peter Lüder first studied in Heidelberg, then spent two decades in Italy before returning to lecture at various universities in Germany. Nicholas of Cusa also spent time in both places. The English may have come from an island, but they were not necessarily insular. Thomas Lenecker was an Englishman who studied in Florence under no less an authority than Poliziano. Lenecker even helped out with the Aldine edition of Aristotle before returning to England in 1499, where he was attached to the court of Henry VIII. It wasn't only humanists were racking up the miles. The Reformation became a European, and not just German, phenomenon because of the movement of the Reformers. A key figure in the Scottish Reformation, John Knox, took inspiration from Calvinism as he experienced it in Geneva, the city he pronounced, the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in this earth since the days of the Apostles. In England, Reform was famously imposed from above when Henry VIII broke with the papacy, but in other places it was often a bottom-up movement, with preachers working to reform Christendom one soul and one city at a time. This meant that the Reformation had, from its earliest days, a significant political dimension. One man's preacher is another man's insurgent, and secular powers ranging from town councils in the Swiss cities to the Holy Roman Emperor had to decide whether to embrace, tolerate, or wage war against this movement that was spreading across Europe. An early event that revealed the Reformation's potential to destabilize the existing political order was the Peasants' War, which began in Switzerland in 1524, when villagers living in Stülingen, in what is now southwest Germany, rose up against the church and secular authorities. This triggered a conflict that raged across central Europe. But Luther rejected the notion that his religious revolution was supposed to come along with revolution of the good old fashioned kind. He and other leaders of the Reformation aimed to secure the allegiance of authoritarian power structures, not to smash those structures to put republican governments in their place. Which did not mean, of course, that the Reformation was depoliticized. To the contrary, the wars and violence had barely started. There were wars of religion in Switzerland around 1530, in the Holy Roman Empire, with the brief Schmalkaldick War in the middle of the 16th century, and then starting in the 1560s in France and the Low Countries. We still see the effects of this upheaval in today's maps and cultural divides. You'll know all about that if you've ever been to Belgium and the Netherlands. Closer to home, for me at least, is Bavaria, a Catholic nation that only grudgingly consents to be part of the larger Protestant nation of Germany. Even those who weren't in a position to declare war sought to resist rulers whose religious convictions they did not share. The radical Anabaptists seized the city of Munster in 1534, but when they weren't staging such ambitious military projects, they contented themselves with refusing to participate in the civil order by swearing oaths or bearing arms. Religious dissidents would assassinate several rulers in the 16th century, prompting a philosophical debate as to whether such so-called tyrannicide was a legitimate response to illegitimate rule. As the years went on, the blood flowed, and government war chests emptied, it became increasingly clear that Protestants and Catholics were going to have to coexist in Europe. One solution was expressed with yet another Latin motto, coius regio oius religio, meaning that citizens would adopt the religious confession of their ruler, but with toleration for worshippers of rival confessions. Religious toleration thus became a political and pragmatic necessity before it was a widely held ideology, so that Sebastian Castello was something of a lone voice when he decried the Calvinist execution of a man in Geneva for denying the doctrine of the Trinity. This provides the background to more famous 17th century discussions of toleration, such as we will find in John Locke. And that was only one echo of the Reformation that would reverberate in the 17th century and beyond. Another legacy was the educational system and the intellectual values it imparted. Still in today's Europe, some high schools carry on the humanist idea that a proper education means being able to read Latin and ancient Greek. In Germany, such a school is even called a humanisticis gymnazion. Then too, it's often been hypothesized that the turn towards empirical science, that so characterized the scientific revolution in the age to come, was made possible by the Reformation. A broadly plausible, though difficult to substantiate, idea would be that Protestantism lent itself to a more concrete approach in science. This might be because of the nominalist metaphysics accepted by many of its adherents, or one might draw a parallel between a democratized approach to scripture and a new movement of investigators who sought to read the book of nature, with both undertakings being relatively unencumbered by the weight of scholastic authority. Now that scripture was taken to be aimed at a broader audience, it was less likely to be seen as an authoritative source on such technical questions as whether the earth goes around the sun or vice versa. And that may have opened up space for empirical inquiry independent of religion. We won't have to wait until the 17th century to observe such developments, since there were advances in scientific method and practice already in our period, alongside an increasing comfort with the skepticism that will be such an important component of early modern philosophy. Another point, one that's rather obvious but still worth stressing, is that many modern philosophers were Protestants. That may shed light on, say, the idealism of Immanuel Kant. Was his Lutheranism connected to his anti-metaphysical and critical approach to philosophy? Later still, G.W.F. Hegel would say outright, The absolute spirit of his own idealist system can be understood as a version of Luther's God, the sole source of all being and all salvation. Which is not to suggest, of course, that the Reformation was itself the sole source of everything that happened in the following centuries of philosophy. But it is to say that this epoch and its transformation of medieval Europe into something rather more like the Europe we know today is something that needs to be included in any worthwhile history of philosophy, and certainly in a history of philosophy without any gaps.