Greg Daly
Luther was by no means the first Christian to claim to be a reformer, Carlos Eire tells Greg Daly
Until the 1970s almost all historical writing about the Reformation was written from a confessional standpoint, according to Yale’s Prof. Carlos Eire. Since then, though, serious efforts at objectivity have been more commonplace, he says, maintaining that he always tries to remain objective on the subject.
“I can’t speak for everyone but in my case what I try to do is to try to get inside the mind of people on every side to write from within – you know ‘what made people do this? what made people think this way?’”, he says, continuing, “I’m not trying to prove that any one of those sides was correct – I’m just simply trying to explain because that’s what historians try to do. We don’t just tell a story – we try to explain what happened and why it might have happened and not take sides. You can’t write the history of the religious mess at this point if you’re partisan.”
Singling out Eric Metaxas’ Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World as a case study in how not to write history – he calls it “very partisan”, “awful”, and “terrible”, with the author apparently convinced that Luther could do no wrong, he says “you have to detach yourself”.
Awards
Author of seven books, starting with 1986’s War Against The Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin, and winner of numerous awards, not least the National Book Award for Nonfiction, Prof. Eire’s mastery of Reformation history is all too apparent in Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650.
As readable as it is vast – the hardback edition weighs almost two kilogrammes – the book’s title gives a subtle but important clue to Prof. Eire’s overall take on the period: he carefully avoids the term ‘The Reformation’, opting instead to point to how many reformations there were.
“There are still historians around who would use the singular,” he says, adding, “I think that’s fine – I can see the value of the argument up to a point.”
There were numerous Protestant reformations, of course, starting with most obviously Luther’s own, but Prof. Eire is keen to impress how the term’s not simply a Protestant one.
“One of the reasons I felt justified in using the plural is that that’s a term that Catholics used at that time,” he says. “They were always talking about reform and reformation in the old usage of the term among Catholics. The Protestant reformation was not called a reformation – it was called a rebellion or a revolt.”
Everyone claimed to be carrying out a reformation, he says, gloomily adding that these reformations all too often also entailed killing those of different convictions.
The concept of reformation had been an old one in the Catholic Church long before Luther, of course, with such figures as St Benedict of Nursia, St Bernard of Clairvaux, and Ss Francis and Dominic all having spearheaded important reform projects in the times.
“It was constant,” Prof. Eire says. “What I argue is that yeah, you do have peak periods, but you always have somebody reforming, because there’s always some corruption somewhere. Always. It’s just a human reality – things go bad. If there’s a chance for something to become corrupt, it will become corrupt, and somebody will spot it and try to fix it.”
Martin Luther’s own reform project started with the issue of indulgences – a common enough sort of complaint and one that others had previously expressed unease about – but it soon moved onto deeper issues of where authority lay in the Church, and of how people are saved. Did ordinary people grasp the theological niceties of Luther’s arguments?
“There were people who understood perfectly, and liked what they heard or read, and there were people who just didn’t get it right,” Prof. Eire says. “Was the basic message understood? There were a lot of basic messages and people kind of mix and match and pick whichever one appealed to them the most.”
Acknowledging that there would definitely have been some glad simply not to have to go to Confession, but doubting that many really comprehended Luther’s arguments about the saving power of Faith alone, Prof. Eire says there were doubtless those who mainly saw Luther’s project as an opportunity to get rid of monastic landlords and take Church lands.
“Luther backed away from the Peasants Revolt precisely for that reason,” he says. “The peasants had understood him to be talking about economic and social freedom and they were mistaken.”
It didn’t take long for the Reformation to spread and mutate with different groups holding to different interpretations of Scripture, a process that has carried on to this day when it’s sometimes estimated that there are upwards of 25,000 distinct Protestant groups.
“It’s like a branching tree,” Prof. Eire says. “I had a student a few years ago who was a mathematics major and wrote a paper interpreting what happened in the Reformation according to fractal theory.” Describing the paper as “wonderful”, he says: “In fact that is the pattern. You get this constant branching, and the branching doesn’t stop right now – the branching continues.
“Luther, I don’t think, had this in mind,” he muses, pointing to Brad Gregory’s 2012 book The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularised Society, and observing “the title is perfect”.
Luther had no idea such divisions would happen, and was immediately angry whenever people disagreed with him, he says. “This is key to understanding Luther. He may have said ‘scripture alone’ but from day one he wouldn’t allow anyone to have any interpretation of scripture that differed from his. So, he wasn’t really granting people personal individual freedom to interpret scripture; he was the interpreter, he was the one with special gift to interpret it correctly.”
This, however, is exactly the stance the other Protestant reformers took too, he adds.
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A further irony lies in how Luther, despite his promotion of the Scriptures’ authority, also acted to exclude and downgraded established parts of the Christian canon.
“In the Old Testament what he doesn’t accept are those books that were not written originally in Hebrew,” Prof. Eire says, continuing, “what he rejects are the books that were sort of closer to the time of Jesus that appeared in the Septuagint Bible which was written in Greek by Jews in Egypt.”
While this meant that Tobit and the books of the Maccabees, for example, were deemed not revelation and so cut from the Bible or relegated to appendices, certain New Testament books were kept, but on sufferance.
“In the New Testament he doesn’t throw anything out, but he basically sets up a hierarchy of which texts are more important and then says very clearly that the entire New Testament and the entire Bible needs to be read through Paul’s letter to the Romans and Paul’s letter to the Galatians – they’re the key for understanding scripture,” he says.
Other books would not be so elevated. “He takes some books like the letter of James and Revelation and says they’re not so important – he actually called the letter of James a ‘letter of straw’, in other words it’s trash because it doesn’t agree with Paul’s letter to the Romans on the issue of faith and works – which was so important to him – because the letter of James says faith without works is dead.”
The Catholic response to this, he said, tended to accept the apparent conflict between Paul and James. “This is one of the many differences between Protestantism and Catholicism – Protestantism has a tendency to see the paradoxes in the Bible and there are many as either/or black and white whereas Catholicism, for 2000 years, and this applies through the 1500s as well has always embrace paradox and the both/and,” Prof. Eire says, citing as an example how the Council of Trent would affirm the reality of predestination while also saying that we have free will which Luther denied.
Modern Lutherans have come closer over time to accepting this ‘both/and’, he ventures, adding that the Catholic Church for its part has since the Second Vatican Council de-emphasised the one thing that bothered Luther the most, which was the counting of individual sins.
While speculating that this has played a decisive role in bringing Lutherans and Catholics to an agreement over the issues of justification or salvation, he says it has also affected Catholic sacramental practice: “people don’t go to confession like they used to”.
Reality
Speaking in Limerick’s Mary Immaculate College earlier this month, Prof. Eire expounded on how Luther and his successors had ‘disenchanted’ the world, denying the reality of the supernatural, with all miracles claimed by the Catholic Church since the death of the last Apostle dismissed as diabolical manipulations of nature. But the Reformers were by no means of one mind in how they looked at reality, Prof. Eire stresses.
“This makes a huge difference – how you interpret reality,” he says, noting that the Swiss Ulrich Zwingli, who vigorously disagreed with Luther on the issue of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist, had been heavily influenced by Plato.
“Zwingli is very much a Platonist – that’s why he finds it difficult for matter and spirit to coincide, because Plato believed that everything in the material world of matter is a poor reflection of a higher reality,” he explains. “So Zwingli makes the spiritual the real and the material here is not unreal, but it’s a poor reflection – it’s so different from and inferior to spirit that you can’t mix the two.”
Luther, on the other hand, draws from a very different philosophical well, one perhaps most famously associated with the English Franciscan William of Ockham.
“Luther couldn’t care less about that because he’s not a Platonist and he’s not an Aristotelian either – to him, these metaphysical questions don’t matter,” Prof. Eire says.
“He doesn’t care because he picked up a different kind of philosophy that developed in the late Middle Ages – he picked up what’s called ‘nominalism’ which is basically that God can do whatever he wants, and that’s God’s absolute Power,” he says. “Of course, in creating the world, God created it in a certain way with certain laws and he only breaks those laws when he needs to get a message across.”
While under this schema, the laws basically stay in place but God can nonetheless do anything, for Luther there was no contradiction in Jesus’ body being present both in Heaven and in the Eucharist.
“Luther says of course Jesus’s body can be in more than one place at one time – he’s divine! That makes sense to him but for Zwingli, who has this other metaphysical understanding of reality, it is impossible,” Prof. Eire says, detailing how Luther accused Zwingli of being too mathematical and Zwingli challenged Luther as being excessively literal.
“And there’s no talking to the other side and not going to be any agreement because they have a different understanding of basically reality,” he says. “It’s not physics – it’s a different understanding of reality.”
The French reformer John Calvin – who was but a child when Luther first launched the Reformation, and who would go on to become, after Luther, probably the most important of the Reformers, was in some respects on the Zwinglian side of this dispute, Prof. Eire says.
“For Calvin, matter and spirit are like fire and water: he uses that metaphor. They’re unmixable. They’re completely different things. Though when it comes to the Eucharist, Calvin does kind of move a little bit towards the Lutheran side: there’s no real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but you can have spiritual communion with Christ: it’s purely spiritual. He puts the Holy Spirit to work and says that during Communion the Holy Spirit brings you close to Christ – but not to his body.”
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The question of the relationship between matter and spirit is what causes the most significant division among the Protestants of the Reformation period, Prof. Eire says, being decisive in preventing the Lutherans in the north and the Reformed in the south from forming a single church.
“It’s not the only issue,” he says, pointing to straightforward personality clashes as well as differences of understanding and conflicts between the local and the universal which sped up fragmentation, as Swiss and Germans and others felt they should have their own local churches.
At the same time, he says, one has to wonder what would have happened had Luther and Zwingli agreed on the spirit-matter debate.
“Maybe you would have had a kind of mega-Protestant church,” he ventures, “but I think you would have still had dissenters to that Church.
“I think the Anabaptists give us a clue as to what happens to people who don’t want to belong to the national or local church – the Anabaptists are always few in number, and they kind of gravitate geographically farther and farther east to where local governments are weak, places like Poland and Russia. But you never have a national church which is Anabaptist. They’re always a minority, they’re often persecuted, so they end up in Eastern Europe or in the Netherlands which is more tolerant – they’re always small in number.”
Ultimately, he suspects, Brad Gregory may have it right in that the principle of personal interpretation of scripture was always going to prevent any kind of Protestant unity.
“It’s like Pandora’s box,” he says. “Once the box is open and the stuff comes out you can’t put it back in.”
Carlos Eire is T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University, and is author of Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650, published by Yale University Press.