May
14
The Direction of Historical Causation
May 14, 2007 |
Mike Liccione of Sacramentum Vitae has an interesting post up today in response to some questions raised by Carl Trueman (now there’s a great name for you) about Francis Beckwith’s recent return to full communion with the Catholic Church. (Side note: Beckwith discusses his reversion at Right Reason, an interesting blog resource for conservative philosophers.) Trueman is a thoughtful and intelligent person, and Mike rightly notes the tone of civility with which he raises his questions about Beckwith’s return to Rome. I don’t think that there’s any need for me to rehearse the actual questions, since I think Mike has already done an excellent job of putting the Catholic response to such questions, not only in today’s post, but on many other occasions. What caught my attention, though, and seemed to me worth a comment, was this quotation from Trueman:
I find myself in basic agreement with Heiko Oberman on the nature of the Reformation struggle over authority. He argued that the clash between Rome and Protestants was not a clash between tradition and Scripture alone, but a struggle over the nature of tradition.
This is a widely held view, and it is a view that is probably commonly taught in history courses of various stripes, but I think it is mistaken. It is the sort of revisionist view that often gets invented by intellectual historians who are looking for the common thematic trend that will help to unify their accounts into something interesting and memorable. It is true, of course, that intellectuals at the time of the Reformation did, indeed, argue about things that were related to the question of the nature of the tradition, but ultimately the real struggle at that time was motivated by concerns that had very little to do with religion. As more and more historians of the period are coming to argue (my favorite in this regard is Eamon Duffy, but there are others) the period was marked by plenty of non-religious struggles that were dressed up in religious clothing in order to inflame partisanship on both sides. The Reformation was driven not so much by intellectual struggles over how to interpret Scripture or where to vest the authority to make such interpretations, but by social, political, and economic clashes that were emerging out of the Medieval milieu and marking the beginning of the modern age, with its struggles between rich and poor, ruling and oppressed classes, democrats and aristocrats, etc.
These are the sorts of forces that usually shape history, not the debates taking place in academia. While it may be true that many made their political allegiances on the basis of this or that theological paradigm, it is certainly true that far more made their theological choices on the basis of their political and social allegiances already in place. To put that another way: the Reformation was not an intellectual struggle over authority in the Church, but potential secular authorities struggling over political power. This is particularly true in England but the same forces were at work on the Continent. This is why the present day differences between Protestantism and Catholicism are so distressing: they have their origins in political struggles that have long since been settled, yet they continue to keep faithful Christians apart who no longer (if they ever did) have any good reasons to be separated from one another. Nowadays, of course, when you get Catholics and Protestants in the same room, they act like they have real differences, but many of those differences were invented over time in order to justify the separation that had already taken place as a consequence of the outcomes of the political struggles. In some cases, such as Catholic and certain conservative Anglicans, it is slowly being discovered that the putative differences were not so communion-severing as was sometimes thought. In other cases, though, the bad feelings run too deep for any sort of quick healing. But with calm and thoughtful folks like Mike Liccione, Carl Trueman, and Francis Beckwith involved in the discussion, one may be permitted to hope for the best.
Comments
2 Comments so far
Wouldn’t it also be true to say that, besides economic. social, and political clashes, the reformation was also driven by personality clashes? Although many historians have touched upon this, I wonder if anyone has done a systematic and in depth study of this factor.
Off topic, here is a subject that might make for a good post. Neil Steinberg has written an article for the Chicago Sun-Times entitled VATICAN FIGHTS DIRTY: THREATS AGAINST PRO-CHOICE POLITICIANS AMOUNTS TO BULLYING. On a number of points I found it to be poorly reasoned.
One point I tried to make was that one doesn’t need to be Catholic in order to be a politician, so any threat against the Catholic standing of a politician (e.g. excommunication) has no real bearing on the issue as a political issue. On the other hand, one does have to be a Catholic in good standing to legitimately receive the Eucharist. Any attempt by a Catholic politician or dim-witted newspaperman to appeal to a Catholic’s political standing to thwart Church discipline is an infringement of the Church’s rights.
Anyway, here is the mercifully short article from the Sun-Times:
http://www.suntimes.com/news/steinberg/381125,CST-NWS-stein1 1.article
I think you’re right that personality clashes had, and indeed always have, a lot to do with historical developments of the sort we see in the Reformation, though I’m not aware of any book-length treatment of that particular aspect of the issue. There is a certain amount of that sort of thing in Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars.
Thanks for the reference to the Sun-Times article–I like the point you make about the double standard.