Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 416 - God’s is the Quarrel - The English Reformation.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adams, 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 LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Gods is the Quarrel, the English Reformation. Imagine, if you can, living in a time of intense ideological disagreement, in which the slightest of provocations escalates into bitter dispute. Hard for us to relate to, but this is exactly how things were in the 16th century, as is illustrated by the Affair of the Queen's Candlesticks. They adorned Elizabeth I's private chapel along with a cross, which seems harmless enough, but some reformers saw this as an unacceptable gesture in the direction of Catholic pageantry. These candles smelled not of potpourri, but of potpourri. At least four times, the offending decorations were defaced or knocked over by outraged individuals who were putting the protest into Protestantism. Unfazed, Elizabeth simply had them replaced. A small enough episode, but as I say, this was an age in which small things mattered. Passionate conflicts were pursued over such apparent trivia as divestments worn by priests, whether the host should be lifted into the air before administering the Eucharistic communion, and whether the person receiving it should kneel. As for such theological issues as the exact mechanics of the Eucharist, or the way in which God offers salvation to humankind, these were considered far from trivial. In defense of their preferred answers to these questions, people were willing to languish for months or years in prison, to die an agonizing death by being burnt at the stake, and of course to inflict these punishments on their fellow Christians. The general mood was that extremism in the cause of piety was no vice. Even those who considered themselves moderate, like Elizabeth herself, inflicted savage punishments on those they considered unduly radical. As we know, none of this was unique to England. We've already discussed such events as the religious wars in the Low Countries and the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in France, but the development of the Reformation in Britain was unique, and created a unique context for philosophy in the British Isles through the 16th century and beyond. The story actually begins well before the rise of Luther and Calvin. In episode 296, we covered the late 14th century Englishman, John Wycliffe, who inspired the so-called Lollard movement. The name was probably an insult, indicating that Lollardy was so much nonsensical babble. The Lollards anticipated the Reformation, rejecting the authority of the established church and questioning the efficacy of its sacraments. It would be natural to assume, then, that when the ideas of Luther made their way to England, they fell upon fertile soil and so easily took root. The scholars are divided about the relevance of Lollardy to the success of the Reformation in England. On the one hand, regions of Lollard activity were often areas where popular Protestantism flourished. On the other hand, Lollardy was greatly weakened by the early 16th century, and the earliest Protestant leaders in England did not have a Lollard background. For our interest, it's worth mentioning that one of those leaders, Robert Barnes, was a member of an early group of Protestant sympathizers, derided as Little Germany, who met at the White House Inn in Cambridge. As we'll be seeing, the universities at Oxford and Cambridge were central in the English Reformation, just one of many reasons that the history of philosophy and religion in this period were inextricably intertwined. If Lollardy wasn't the driving force for reform in England, then what was? One obvious answer would be that Henry VIII wanted to get divorced, and the pope wouldn't let him. You may well have learned about this in high school or in the late Hilary Mantel's brilliant novels about Henry's fixer, Thomas Cromwell, but just in case, here's a quick refresher. Henry was wedded to Catherine, his brother's widow. When he tired of her and the fact that she hadn't given him a male heir, he fixed his eye on Anne Boleyn. He tried to get his marriage dissolved on the grounds that it was illegitimate to marry one's own sister-in-law, but the pope refused to grant this request, leading to a split from the church. This familiar story suggests that Henry's motives were entirely cynical and breathtakingly self-interested, but there were issues of greater import here than who would be sharing the king's bedroom. As we know, ecclesiastical and secular power had been competing with one another throughout the medieval period. In step with his changing romantic affections, Henry's ideas about this longstanding issue evolved. He came to think that, as monarch, it was he and not the pope who was the supreme religious authority for his people. Across his reign, the difference between political sedition and unacceptable religious teaching became blurred, then erased altogether. The power of the crown was used to burn both books and heretics, and the question of what good Christians should believe had an answer that was, in a sense, constantly evolving, and in a sense, always the same. They should believe whatever the king did. Having been selected by God to lead his people, Henry saw himself not as the amateur theologian he in fact was, but as the rightful arbiter of religious doctrine. His views, and thus the correct views, shifted in response to such varied factors as papal intransigence, pushback from parliament, and the influence of Anne Boleyn, who had grown up in the French court and helped to import the reformist agenda of the circle of Le Thieu de Taple. The upshot was a kind of compromise. Papal authority was rejected, and fundamental aspects of English religion like monasteries and pilgrimage were eliminated, a massive upheaval for the life of ordinary believers. This sounds thoroughly Protestant. Yet many features of Catholic practice were retained, ranging from liturgical details to fundamental doctrine. Notably, Henry was firmly convinced of the real presence of Christ's body in the Eucharist. He also believed that good works and human effort were needed to achieve salvation, rather than accepting the Lutheran concept of justification by faith alone. There was a serious downside to making the monarch's views definitive in this way, even aside from the fact that the king might be a capricious megalomaniac like Henry. Catholics die, and their replacements are selected by a combination of blind luck and warfare. So Henry's religious revolution could have been followed by a further push in the direction of Protestantism, a return to the Catholic fold, or an attempt to solidify his arguably rather muddled middle position. In the event, all three of these things happened, and in that order. He was succeeded in 1547 by Edward VI. Since Edward was a Protestant who was happy to move the country even more decisively away from the Church of Rome, the party of Reform continued to think it was quite right that royal and religious authority should be fused together. Then suddenly this came to seem like a much worse policy. Edward died young in 1553, and was followed by Mary, the Catholic daughter of Henry and his first wife Catherine. Persecution was now directed against Protestants instead of Catholics, with a new raft of books placed on the banned list and almost 300 martyrs burnt during her reign. Some Protestants found this grimly satisfying. Instead of wringing their hands at the unpredictable and inadequate reforms approved by Protestant monarchs, they could now revel in the more familiar and morally gratifying role of innocent victims. One of them, John Scory, exalted that, banishments, gallows, fires, and the cruelty of tyrants are again restored to the Church. But not for long. Mary reigned for only about as long as Edward had. When she died in 1558, Elizabeth ascended to the throne. She would reign for the rest of the century and beyond, dying only in 1603. This was an opportunity for Protestantism to become entrenched, though not without plenty of further violence and disputation. At first, Elizabeth was relatively tolerant of religious conservatives, to avoid picking fights with them, and more importantly, with foreign Catholic powers, especially Spain. Then too, as the story of the candlesticks shows, she was herself something of a conservative And though the really distinctive feature of her religious convictions was a tactical reluctance to reveal what exactly they might be. Then, in a misguided attempt to support a Catholic uprising against her rule, the sitting Pope excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570, declaring that as far as he was concerned, no one owed her obedience anymore. This was at best unhelpful for Catholics in England, as it reinforced the notion that they were seditious traitors. Again, the line between religious and political dissent was being erased. Yet Elizabeth also needed to hold the line against more radical Protestant movements. These included the Presbyterians, who wanted to eliminate the hierarchical structure of the Church of England, a leftover from Catholicism, and then there were the Puritans. This term, like the word Lawlard, originated as an unflattering description, in this case applied to those who wanted to strip churches of their last decorations, no more candlesticks, and make official doctrine conform to the more radical ideas circulating on the continent. They were disdainful of Elizabeth's middle path, which they called neither hot nor cold, and considered the English Reformation to be a job that was at best half done. Elizabeth turned the weapons of state oppression against them, so that both Catholics and radical Protestants were in danger during her reign. We see a phenomenon here that, to put it mildly, has survived into our own age, the English suspicion of all things European. This had been a problem for Mary, who could win support for the return of traditional rituals, but found precious little enthusiasm for obedience to the Pope. On the other side, the Puritans were resented for their self-righteousness and disruption of popular religious practices. As one saying had it, the Puritan was one who loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbor with all his heart. Perhaps no single intellectual of the age represented the middle ground between Catholicism and Puritism, which would come to define Anglicanism, so well as Thomas Cranmer. His story also demonstrates how treacherous were the shifting sands of 16th century England. In 1532 Cranmer was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by Henry VIII. This came as a surprise to just about everyone, not least Cranmer himself. Previously, he'd been a relatively obscure theologian at Cambridge University. He duly performed the service expected of him by dissolving the king's marriage. Cranmer then led the effort to shape church doctrine under Henry and Edward. He was entirely on board with ascribing religious authority to the king, writing in a letter to Henry, Your Grace, a very right, and by God's law, is the supreme head of this Church of England, next immediately unto God. But the aforementioned irony that royal supremacy could be used to reassert Roman Catholicism just as much as to abolish it was for Cranmer a fatal one. When Mary came to the throne, he was at the top of the list of reformers who needed to be cast down and punished. Cranmer tried to save his life by agreeing to abjure his previous teachings in writing. When he was sentenced to execution nonetheless, he staged a dramatic recantation on the scaffold, declaring, As much as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, My hand shall first be punished therefore, For may I come to the fire, it shall be first burned. And he thrust his own hand into the flames, a scene made iconic by its description in John Fox's Book of Martyrs. That's the version of Cranmer's career that you'd see in a Hollywood film, but this is a history of philosophy podcast, should we should attend to the more subtle tensions and shifts in his thought, as he considered to what extent Lutheranism and Calvinism should be imported into England. When I say imported, I mean it quite literally. In Henry's reign, Protestant literature was at first forbidden, and had to be smuggled into the country after being printed abroad in places like Worms and Anferth. The presses of both cities churned out copies of works by William Tyndale, responsible for a new English version of the Bible that was strongly influenced by Luther. Cranmer himself spent time abroad and wound up marrying the niece of Andreas Oseander. You'll remember him as the one who tried to defend Copernicus by saying that his new system was merely a hypothesis. Cranmer brought his new wife back to England, but had to send her into exile after Henry came to reject the idea that priests could take wives. Given Henry's track record, I suspect he was thinking he might just want to marry them himself. This policy notwithstanding, leading reformers immigrated to enjoy the welcoming embrace of England. Peter Vermigli arrived in 1547 and became a professor of divinity at Oxford, where he engaged in disputations over the Eucharist, attacking the doctrine of real presence. Two years later, Martin Busser came from Strasbourg at the invitation of Cranmer and took a professorship at Cambridge. He spent the last two years of his life there, conducting disputations of his own, in which he defended the Protestant view on grace and justification. Despite Cranmer's unflinching support for royal leadership of the church, he was often at odds with Henry on points of doctrine. He, like Busser, accepted the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone, whereas, as I've already mentioned, the king was inclined to think that we can merit salvation through good works. Henry's rationale was the usual one, people need to be encouraged to behave well, not just hope that God will save them without their deserving it. Cranmer responded by stressing Luther's point that true faith always gives rise to good works. Grace and justification are not given as a reward for morally excellent behavior. To the contrary, such behavior is a kind of symptom and result of God's grace. Another tension between Cranmer and Henry concerned the question of the Eucharist. Whereas the king believed in the real presence of Christ in the communion, Cranmer came to accept the so-called sacramentalist view that the physical bread and wine are only, as he put it, sensible signs and tokens. In support of this theological position, he provided philosophical arguments, especially in a debate with the more theologically conservative Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardner. There is, argued Cranmer, a fundamental metaphysical difference between spiritual and physical reality. So if the effect of the communion is meant to be spiritual, then it does not need to involve a physical change of bread into flesh. He also added a nice point about the way we use words. When Christ shared out bread to his disciples and said, this is my body, he was simply bestowing a title upon it, as when people call Cranmer and Gardner, Canterbury and Winchester, in light of their positions as bishops. In another passage from this debate, Cranmer sought to put Gardner in his proper place, namely a subordinate one. Alluding to his opponent's training as a lawyer rather than a theologian, Cranmer suggested that Gardner should submit to the authority of those with more expertise, like Cranmer himself, for instance, who had earned the right to determine true doctrine for himself. He said to Gardner, I, having exercised myself in the study of Scripture and divinity from my youth, have learned now to go alone. Despite Luther's talk of the priesthood of all believers, we've seen repeatedly that leading reformers were quite happy to tell everyone else what to believe. This was often justified on humanist grounds. I know Hebrew and Greek and you don't, so you should listen to me when I tell you the meaning of the Scriptures. In the passage just quoted, Cranmer does not flaunt knowledge of ancient languages, but he does something similar, asserting his prerogative as a specialist to think for himself, even where his determinations departed dramatically from centuries' worth of tradition. His deliberations issued in the English Book of Common Prayer, published in 1549 and again in a revision of 1552. Cranmer had a leading role in its composition, and it is the most lasting statement of his mature theology, which turned out to be a pretty wholehearted endorsement of the reform agenda, especially in the second edition. One historian has written of the Book of Common Prayer that it did away with almost everything that had, until then, been central to lay Eucharistic piety. Yet the book also argues for retaining some traditional church practices on the grounds that, without some ceremonies, it is not possible to keep any order or quiet discipline in the church. Some disagreed. At the beginning of this episode, I mentioned that there were even conflicts over what priests wore in church. I had in mind John Hooper, who complained about the 1552 version of the book because it allowed the priest to wear traditional vestments. There was no scriptural support for such a symbolic assertion of hierarchy. In vain would you search the Bible for a passage reading, No shirt, no shoes, no service. And by wearing distinctive ceremonial garb, the priests were separating themselves from the laity. The fact that Cranmer was willing to defend such practices shows that, in a way, he too was a conservative. He was willing to overturn customs and institutions that seemed problematic to him, and there were plenty of those, ranging from details of the mass to monasteries and pilgrimages. But other features of traditional religion could be kept, because they were indifferent, that is, neither required by God's revelation nor inconsistent with it. The same justification was later given by theologians in the time of Elizabeth, when they concluded a disputation over those candlesticks by somewhat grudgingly admitting that it didn't really matter whether they stood in her chapel. A more momentous example was something we find with John Wickgift, Archbishop of Canterbury under Elizabeth, as of 1583. Against the Presbyterians, he defended the structure of the Church of England, with its ranked layers of bishops, priests, and deacons, this on the grounds that no one arrangement is prescribed in Scripture so that any practically effective solution would be acceptable. But any such appeal to the indifference of certain matters was rejected by more radical Protestants. For them, Scripture should be followed to the letter in all things. Everything that wasn't right was wrong, nothing was neutral. The second edition of the Book of Common Prayer from 1552 would turn out to mark the limit of established reform in England. Those who wanted a more thorough divestment, in Hooper's case quite literally, of Catholic customs would continue to see the changes in religious practice as a job half done. And modern historians have often agreed. It has been argued that, far from being fertile ground prepared by the Lollards for religious revolution, late medieval England actually had a thriving and successful Catholic culture. People were not crying out for change, and there was no equivalent of the Peasants' War in 16th century England. Rather, change was imposed from above, in a so-called magisterial reformation. Furthermore, because Catholicism enjoyed broad acceptance, it died only slowly. The wider population might be ready to ditch the Pope, a distant figure to whom they owed little or no devotion, but they clung to the customs and rituals that structured their lives and provided familiar spiritual comforts. Scholars thus admit that, historians now cannot decide when the Reformation occurred, and that by the end of the century English churchgoers were decatholicized but un-protestantized. What they were not is a good deal clearer than what they were. Maybe what they were, most of all, was confused. They might well have appreciated the summary of the Reformation found in a classic book spoofing literary history called From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. Throughout the Middle Ages, England had been Roman Catholic, but with Henry's divorce, she became Christian, although the French still obstinately believed in God and remained Catholic. We can leave it to the less satirical historians to debate the question of whether the Reformation in England was fast or slow, but given our interest in the history of philosophy, we should at least note that the contrast between a top-down and bottom-up Reformation imposed by political elites or demanded by the masses leaves something out. Namely, the crucial role of a group in the middle, the university-trained philosophers and theologians. Radical intellectuals were smuggling books into England and daring to form Protestant discussion groups well before Henry decided that Roman Catholicism was an impediment to his family planning. Even the clerics who were closest to political power were independent-minded and pushed to back against royal religious dictates. We've seen that Cranmer did so while serving Henry. From the reign of Elizabeth, we might mention another archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Grindel. He defied the queen in order to defend the practice of prophesying, in which popular preachers worked to convert audiences to a more rigorous form of Protestantism. Grindel advised the queen to be careful in exercising her authority over such religious affairs. She should not pronounce too resolutely and preemptorily, as would be appropriate in civil and extern matters. Famously, he then added, I choose rather to offend your earthly majesty than to offend the heavenly majesty of God. Elizabeth was indeed offended and he was stripped of his office. The case of Grindel, and in fact pretty much everything I've covered in this episode, show how contested was the relation between state and religious power in this era. We often think of the divine right of kings as a medieval idea, that it was here in the 16th century that a king dared to say that, having been selected to rule by God, he could replace the pope as the highest religious authority. A result we've already identified, that heresy came to be treated as a form of treason, would have long-running implications for freedom of thought. Further philosophical issues were explored in connection to the debates over the Eucharist and justification by faith alone. Is it possible for bread to turn into another substance while retaining its sensible properties? If good works do not justify, what role is left for free will and moral responsibility? I won't belabor these points because I've addressed them in previous episodes. Instead, I'd like to highlight a couple of other philosophical topics that we haven't talked about so much as yet and that became salient in the English Reformation. First, the question of authenticity and belief. In this period, people spoke of Nicodemism, a reference to the biblical figure Nicodemus, a Jewish leader who was only willing to speak to Jesus in secret at night. They meant the common practice of hiding true religious convictions out of fear of persecution. Elizabeth herself could be accused of this, given her reticence to make her own views known both before and after she became queen, but the charge could be aimed at a wide swaths of the population. Protestant rule failed for decades to eradicate sympathy for Catholicism, but understandably, few people were ready to burn at the state in the name of that sympathy. The Spanish ambassador and bishop, Álvaro de Quadra, spoke out against this hypocrisy, saying that, It is far better to suffer most bitter cruelties than to give the least sign of consent to such wicked and abominable rights, they which he meant Protestant services. Similarly, the Oxford academic Robert Persons, a Catholic sympathizer, thought that one should not agree to go to a Protestant church just to avoid trouble. A similarly strict line was taken by Protestants. You may remember Calvin advising his French supporters to go into exile rather than pretending to be good Catholics. During the persecution of Protestants under Mary Tudor, many English reformers did just that. When Protestantism returned, its theologians thought that many people were still playing it safe. William Perkins, for instance, enjoined the faithful not just to parrot religious truths but to, Apply them inwardly to your hearts and consciences, and outwardly to your lives in conversation. This is the very point in which we fail. So similar were the Catholic and Protestant frustrations over this issue that one Puritan, the delightfully named Edmund Bunny, recycled invective against religious hypocrisy from a Jesuit author. I'm guessing that insincere celebrations of Easter, in particular, made him hopping mad. The form of words used in that quotation from Perkins shows why this is a topic of philosophical interest. Can one hold a sincere belief inwardly without manifesting it outwardly? Or is it morally unacceptable to go through the motions while silently thinking that they are bogus? Speaking of the Jesuits, this is an issue we'll revisit when we get to them and talk about their policy of mental reservation. A final area of philosophical interest worth flagging here is the role of religion in forming identity and community. It's a familiar worry that the loss of uniform religious commitment tends to undermine social cohesion. The modern-day version of that concern is that the rise of secularism has removed an important bond that used to hold together nation-states and unify their populations. The 16th century English had a similar fear, though in their case it was prompted by the unraveling of traditional customs in the name of Protestant piety. A recent book by Andy Wood looks at the value of neighborliness in this period and shows how widespread was the feeling that reform was the opposite of a good fence it makes for bad neighbors. Wood provides many choice quotes, including the one I already offered you about Puritans loving God and hating their neighbors. Here's another one, which is on the long side but well worth savoring. It's from a dialogue written by Thomas Smith in 1549. Some with this opinion and some with that, some holding this way and some that way, and some another, and that so stiffly, as though the truth must be as they say that have the upper hand in contention. And this contention is not the least cause of these uproar's of the people, some holding of the one learning and some holding of the other. In my mind it made no matter if there were no learned men at all, for of diversity thereof comes diverse opinions. Notice that Smith traced the uproar's he so lamented to the conflict between learned men. This provides support for the idea that a few stubbornly convinced intellectuals were indeed having a dramatic impact on wider society. The Reformation is proof that ideas do affect the world, even if not in the way their inventors intended. As we trace the impact of the Reformation across Europe, we are left with one more region that needs to be considered in detail. To the north of England, a version of the same story was being written, with enormous consequences for the development of philosophy in the 16th century and beyond. Perhaps most remarkable in the short term were the radical proposals that were being made in the political sphere. The writings of John Knox and George Buchanan will remind us of arguments we saw in Huguenot and others, but follow those arguments even further, to the alarming conclusion that the assassination of a tyrannical ruler may be justified. So join me next time as we learn about the circumstances in which a king may be killed as we look at the Reformation in Scotland, here on The History of Philosophy without any doubt.