a425couple
2017-02-07 03:13:26 UTC
30 January 2017
The shout that awakened nations
Martin Luther, the Reformation - and the birth of the modern world.
By Simon Heffer
There is still the odd parish church in England with a notice on its south
door that begins: "There are those who will tell you that at the time of the
Reformation the Church of England ceased to be Catholic and became
Protestant. Do not believe them." It is a bemusing argument, hinting at the
divisions within Anglicanism that stemmed from Henry VIII's decision to
establish a state church in 1534 and reject the authority of the pope in
Rome.
Many Anglican clergy long for the Western Church to be reunited, but
important practical and doctrinal differences obstruct this - not least the
celibacy of clergy and the ordination of women as priests. Henry VIII's
decision had little to do with religion, though a theological earthquake in
continental Europe had made it possible. Not the least of the secular
consequences of that earthquake was that the king of England could, in order
to marry his mistress, set up his own Christian Church, and in doing so
change the course of English, and British, history. It is not least why we
have a queen of German descent, and why for centuries Britain and Ireland
had such bad relations.
By 1534 the course of European history had already been changed; large
tracts of the world would in the ensuing centuries have their destinies
changed as a result. On 31 October it will be 500 years since Martin Luther,
an Augustinian monk from Saxony, sent his bishop, Albrecht of Mainz, his
Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences. And Luther may, as the
mythology states, have nailed the document - also known as the 95 Theses -
to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, where he was a theologian at
the university.
In England it occasioned the most significant moment in history between the
Battle of Hastings and the Great War: significant because of all that flowed
from it, not in a theological sense, but in its secular effect. In Europe it
caused an upheaval not seen since the establishment of the Holy Roman empire
in 800, and it was the beginning of the end of that empire. The history of
the West changed in that moment. Despite the efforts of the Spanish and
Portuguese to establish Catholic empires around the world, the most
extensive empire of all would be the Protestant, British one. Its creation
was directly attributable to the religious, economic and cultural
consequences of the Reformation, and it would be imported into North
America, Africa and Australasia.
Luther, who was 33 when he picked this argument with his Church, had become
a monk after a bolt of lightning hit the ground near him and thus spared
him. Later, he was ordained as a priest. He was a gifted and disputatious
academic theologian. The cause of his affront was that the then pope, Leo
X - a Medici from Florence - had granted the sale of indulgences to raise
money to complete St Peter's at Rome, and had sent Johann Tetzel, his
commissioner for indulgences, to Germany to raise funds in this way.
Purchase of an indulgence supposedly guaranteed less time in purgatory.
Luther was outraged: he had developed a system of belief in which simple
faith, not the execution of good works or donations of money to various
forms of charity, was the way to salvation. In this way, he was also
indirectly the father of the welfare state.
Luther's 86th thesis asked why, given the pope's wealth, he did not use his
own money to pay for St Peter's rather than that of "poor believers". Bishop
Albrecht did not respond to his complaint, but sent the document to Rome.
Early in 1518, using the relatively new medium of the printing press, the 95
Theses, in the universal language of Latin, were distributed around Germany
and, with remarkable speed, much of Europe, too. Thomas Carlyle, for whom
Luther was one of history's heroes, called this expression of outrage a
"shout", and wrote: "The Pope should not have provoked that 'shout'! It was
the shout of the awakening of nations."
***
Carlyle got to the root of the significance of the Reformation, and why it
shapes our world so profoundly. There had been challenges to the Christian
religious orthodoxy before - remember King John's, not to mention other
outbursts of insolence around Catholic Europe - but Luther's came at a time
to trigger the perfect storm. The Reformation provoked a challenge to
spiritual authority for which not merely the masses, but many of their
rulers, felt ready; the invention of the printing press also allowed their
view to be broadcast with an ease hitherto impossible. In the same manner as
Henry VIII and his successors would establish a principle of absolute
sovereignty - eventually, parliamentary sovereignty - in England and then in
Great Britain, other polities in northern Europe gradually ended the
influence of the pope and the Catholic Church in their affairs.
The Church hierarchy tried to talk Luther out of his views, but failed. In
April 1521 he was summoned to the Diet of Worms, providing the moment
Carlyle described as "the greatest scene in Modern European History; the
point, indeed, from which the whole subsequent history of civilisation takes
its rise". This was where secular authority under Charles V, the Holy Roman
emperor, tried to persuade Luther to recant. He refused: the mythology has
it that this was when he pronounced: "Here I stand. I can do no other." He
was outlawed and excommunicated: but Frederick the Wise, the sympathetic
elector of Saxony, shielded him in his castle at Wartburg and, once the heat
was off, Luther set about organising his own Church on his own principles.
The secular effects of this attack on authority were soon apparent. A
peasants' revolt in parts of Germany in 1525, which for strategic reasons
Luther declined to support, showed the mood, and helped explain why in the
northern German lands, in the Low Countries and elsewhere in Europe, people
flocked to the new brand of Christianity. Lutheranism was the
anti-establishment populism of its day and a means whereby, in an age before
democracy, the unfranchised could make their voices heard.
Luther's ideas inspired, and were developed by, John Calvin, a Frenchman who
expounded his own theology from Geneva, where he had gone into exile. If we
owe Luther (among other things) the intellectual right to question and
reject authority, especially when it can be proved wrong or corrupt, we owe
Calvin the Protestant work ethic, as well as the flourishing of capitalism
and enterprise that stems from it. The left should be well aware of this
point, as it was the basis of R H Tawney's Religion and the Rise of
Capitalism, published in 1926; the right should know it through
the political economist Max Weber. Calvin saw work as a duty that the
individual owed God and fellow citizens out of gratitude for redemption
through Jesus Christ: no one had the right not to work if able to do so.
Those who shared his belief that the industrious would prosper in the
afterlife developed a culture that not only created capitalism, but
encouraged the buccaneers, pioneers and adventurers who would seek to build
empires.
Thus, as Carlyle said, the Reformation marked the moment when society
stopped caring about the moral and spiritual health of people and started to
worry about their economic and practical condition. Other historians have
put it more bluntly: it was the moment when the Middle Ages ended and the
modern world began. It brought with it ideas and attitudes such as social
mobility, an inevitable by-product of a society where work and enterprise
are promoted. Luther was in some senses highly enlightened, and his
enlightenment spread: he set an example of freedom of thought, opening up
new inquiries into science and philosophy. This establishment of the right
to individual conscience leads to the contention that our modern idea of
liberty stems from the Reformation.
Some who pursued liberty of thought and conscience in rigidly Catholic
societies, such as Galileo a century later, still struggled; yet by the time
Galileo was put under house arrest for claiming that the sun was the centre
of the solar system many were belatedly accepting Copernicus's theory of
heliocentricity, advanced around the time of the 95 Theses. The Reformation
signalled the moment when the Church lost control of science, though even
Protestants retained a prejudice, born of fear, against radical inquiry. It
was the 19th century before geology became an accepted subject of study at
English universities, for fear it would contradict what the Bible said about
the chronology of the Creation.
Luther's sense of enlightenment also led him to oppose the subjugation of
women, believing they should be able to divorce an unsatisfactory husband.
Excommunicated, he himself married a former nun, unilaterally ending the
notion that a clergyman had to be celibate. He was also deeply opposed to
slavery, an abomination whose international abolition was eventually driven
by British and American Quakers. However, there was one marked respect in
which his doctrine was anything but enlightened, and its poisonous legacy
would resonate down the centuries.
Luther had argued initially for Christians to treat Jews kindly, in the hope
of converting them; but by the 1530s he had abandoned any idea of mass
conversion and saw persecution as the only alternative. He became
unequivocally anti-Semitic and called explicitly for Jews to be removed from
all German territories, their houses and synagogues burned, and their
chattels and religious texts confiscated; they were also to be denied safe
passage as they travelled. Jews fled to eastern Europe to avoid the
privations Lutherans forced on them, congregating particularly in Catholic
Poland, and in Habsburg lands to the south and east.
Luther now condemned those Christians who helped the Jews; indeed, one
Lutheran pastor in the Alsatian town of Hochfelden ordered his congregation
to go out and murder them. A substantial Jewish community lived in
Hochfelden until 1940, when the Nazis began to deport them. Then in December
1941, six weeks before the Wannsee Conference, seven confederations of
Protestant churches in Germany announced their support for the Nazi policy
of forcing Jews to wear the Star of David. From time to time the Nazis used
Luther to justify their persecution.
Nor would this be the only form of Protestant racism. In South Africa, the
Dutch Reformed Church was explicit in its endorsement of apartheid, and
Hendrik Verwoerd, its architect, was educated by Lutherans. But racism was
not inextricable from the Reformation: in 1982 the World Alliance of
Reformed Churches, which took its main inspiration from Calvin rather than
Luther, expelled the Dutch Reformed Church and declared apartheid a sin.
Luther soon had followers among secular rulers other than Frederick the
Wise, who in 1531 formed a defensive alliance called the Schmalkaldic
League. In 1555 it forced Charles V to conclude the Peace of Augsburg,
allowing Lutheran rulers to exist within the Holy Roman empire: this
sundered Protestant Germany from Catholic Germany, a divide that persisted
until the declaration of the Second Reich in 1871. It then took until the
end of the Thirty Years War in 1648 and the Peace of Westphalia to allow
Calvinist rule, too, within the empire. In that war, 40 per cent of the
population of what is now Germany was killed, partly through plague. Eight
million people died altogether, in a series of wars that began over the
determination of Emperor Ferdinand II to renege on the Treaty of Augsburg
and impose Catholicism throughout the empire. In time, however, the war
became a conflict between the leading powers - notably the French and the
Habsburgs - squabbling over territory and influence, with Catholic France
finding it desirable for reasons of security to support the Protestants,
and with powers as far-flung as Spain and Sweden joining in.
The other consequences of Luther's Reformation were less horrific. His
translation of the Bible into the German vernacular helped standardise that
language and had a profound effect on German literacy and culture: it
founded a literary tradition that would flower after the Thirty Years War
with the Baroque period, and then produce Kant, Goethe and Schiller. Luther
was also a prolific hymn-writer. A German musical tradition that passed down
from Bach and influenced composers around Europe was greatly stimulated by
the Church he founded. The growth of literacy further fed debate and
discourse. Luther's translation of the Bible was emulated in England,
Scotland and other Protestant countries, and had a similarly galvanising
effect on culture in those lands. It was not just that, greatly helped by
printing, translation made religion more accessible and comprehensible to
the masses: greater literacy propelled freedom of speech and thought. The
Reformation provoked the greatest explosion of information, knowledge and
ideas until the arrival of the internet.
Despite his strictures against ideas promulgated by the Jews, Luther
advocated inquiry as a means of stimulating freedom of thought. Even though
he saw it as a tool of the devil, he also wanted the Quran to be freely
available so that it could be subject to scrutiny. Ironically, this spirit
of inquiry and debate did not always exist in Luther's own denomination. The
Pilgrim Fathers went to America, founding the nation as we know it and
providing perhaps one of the greatest consequences of the Reformation, only
because of the mutual intolerance of factions within Protestantism. The
emigration on the Mayflower can be traced back to the departure from the
East Midlands of early Nonconformists, who fled to Holland in 1606-07 to
escape rising persecution in the Church of England. Perhaps predictably,
when they arrived in New Plymouth they radiated loathing of other religions,
notably Catholicism, setting in place an institutional prejudice in America.
It took the United States until 1960, and the election of John F Kennedy, to
choose a Catholic president.
***
In continental Europe, the political, constitutional and economic effects of
the Reformation have been profound. In Britain, it is why Queen Elizabeth II
sits on the throne and not Franz, Duke of Bavaria, the premier descendant of
Charles I of England, who would otherwise be King Francis II. Charles I's
failure to accept the religious consequences of the Reformation helped cause
the English Civil War. The refusal of his son James II to do so brought
about the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and the Act of Settlement, preventing
the Catholic children of James and their descendants from inheriting the
throne and offering it to the distantly related House of Hanover. Thanks to
this, the monarch was taken out of British politics, with the office of
prime minister developing after 1721 to manage affairs on behalf of George I
and the role of the sovereign being steadily eroded over the next two
centuries into what we now call a constitutional monarchy.
The hostility with France from the late 17th century until 1815 was fed by
English outrage at the revocation in 1685 by Louis XIV of the Edict of
Nantes, by which Protestants had had their rights protected in France. An
estimated 50,000 of the most accomplished people in France - Calvinist
Huguenots - migrated across the Channel, forming one of the biggest waves of
immigration in English history of one group relative to the existing
population. For generations they and their descendants made a valuable
contribution to British life, setting up enclaves of weavers in Canterbury
and Spitalfields and lacemakers in Worcestershire, and also settling in
Ireland, where they became prominent both in business and in local
government.
The transfer of power from religious to secular authority in central Europe
after the Peace of Westphalia paved the way for a continent dominated in the
late 19th century by Germany, with all that would entail. It was a grotesque
perversion of history that Adolf Hitler, a lapsed Catholic, should reunite
those who were culturally German into a heathen form of the Holy Roman
empire on the Anschluss with Austria of 1938.
France passed a loi de laïcité in 1905 formally separating the state from
the power of the Roman Catholic Church; but in that country's affairs what
is still called the haute société protestante has an influence far exceeding
the proportion of Protestants in society, whether in politics, officialdom
or business. Protestants had been allowed back into France after 1789 and
the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and they applied their Calvinist work
ethic to French business. Peugeot and Hermès were founded and run by
Protestants. So, too, were some of the biggest French firms, such as the
Schlumberger industrial group, whose origins were in Alsace. Protestants are
disproportionately represented in finance and utility companies. The
relatively great wealth of northern (Protestant) Europe compared to the
Catholic south is still a matter of tension in the European Union.
A secular society such as ours naturally regards politics as driving the
course of history, but at this 500th anniversary it is right to recall what
has driven the course of politics. Martin Luther did not only change the
world: the consequences of this quarrelsome but brave monk's actions
continue to affect the world to this day. If you seek his monument, look
around you.
Simon Heffer is a columnist for the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs
Simon Heffer is a journalist, author and political commentator, who has
worked for long stretches at the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail. He has
written biographies of Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Enoch
Powell, and reviews and writes on politics for the New Statesman.
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/01/shout-awakened-nations
The shout that awakened nations
Martin Luther, the Reformation - and the birth of the modern world.
By Simon Heffer
There is still the odd parish church in England with a notice on its south
door that begins: "There are those who will tell you that at the time of the
Reformation the Church of England ceased to be Catholic and became
Protestant. Do not believe them." It is a bemusing argument, hinting at the
divisions within Anglicanism that stemmed from Henry VIII's decision to
establish a state church in 1534 and reject the authority of the pope in
Rome.
Many Anglican clergy long for the Western Church to be reunited, but
important practical and doctrinal differences obstruct this - not least the
celibacy of clergy and the ordination of women as priests. Henry VIII's
decision had little to do with religion, though a theological earthquake in
continental Europe had made it possible. Not the least of the secular
consequences of that earthquake was that the king of England could, in order
to marry his mistress, set up his own Christian Church, and in doing so
change the course of English, and British, history. It is not least why we
have a queen of German descent, and why for centuries Britain and Ireland
had such bad relations.
By 1534 the course of European history had already been changed; large
tracts of the world would in the ensuing centuries have their destinies
changed as a result. On 31 October it will be 500 years since Martin Luther,
an Augustinian monk from Saxony, sent his bishop, Albrecht of Mainz, his
Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences. And Luther may, as the
mythology states, have nailed the document - also known as the 95 Theses -
to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, where he was a theologian at
the university.
In England it occasioned the most significant moment in history between the
Battle of Hastings and the Great War: significant because of all that flowed
from it, not in a theological sense, but in its secular effect. In Europe it
caused an upheaval not seen since the establishment of the Holy Roman empire
in 800, and it was the beginning of the end of that empire. The history of
the West changed in that moment. Despite the efforts of the Spanish and
Portuguese to establish Catholic empires around the world, the most
extensive empire of all would be the Protestant, British one. Its creation
was directly attributable to the religious, economic and cultural
consequences of the Reformation, and it would be imported into North
America, Africa and Australasia.
Luther, who was 33 when he picked this argument with his Church, had become
a monk after a bolt of lightning hit the ground near him and thus spared
him. Later, he was ordained as a priest. He was a gifted and disputatious
academic theologian. The cause of his affront was that the then pope, Leo
X - a Medici from Florence - had granted the sale of indulgences to raise
money to complete St Peter's at Rome, and had sent Johann Tetzel, his
commissioner for indulgences, to Germany to raise funds in this way.
Purchase of an indulgence supposedly guaranteed less time in purgatory.
Luther was outraged: he had developed a system of belief in which simple
faith, not the execution of good works or donations of money to various
forms of charity, was the way to salvation. In this way, he was also
indirectly the father of the welfare state.
Luther's 86th thesis asked why, given the pope's wealth, he did not use his
own money to pay for St Peter's rather than that of "poor believers". Bishop
Albrecht did not respond to his complaint, but sent the document to Rome.
Early in 1518, using the relatively new medium of the printing press, the 95
Theses, in the universal language of Latin, were distributed around Germany
and, with remarkable speed, much of Europe, too. Thomas Carlyle, for whom
Luther was one of history's heroes, called this expression of outrage a
"shout", and wrote: "The Pope should not have provoked that 'shout'! It was
the shout of the awakening of nations."
***
Carlyle got to the root of the significance of the Reformation, and why it
shapes our world so profoundly. There had been challenges to the Christian
religious orthodoxy before - remember King John's, not to mention other
outbursts of insolence around Catholic Europe - but Luther's came at a time
to trigger the perfect storm. The Reformation provoked a challenge to
spiritual authority for which not merely the masses, but many of their
rulers, felt ready; the invention of the printing press also allowed their
view to be broadcast with an ease hitherto impossible. In the same manner as
Henry VIII and his successors would establish a principle of absolute
sovereignty - eventually, parliamentary sovereignty - in England and then in
Great Britain, other polities in northern Europe gradually ended the
influence of the pope and the Catholic Church in their affairs.
The Church hierarchy tried to talk Luther out of his views, but failed. In
April 1521 he was summoned to the Diet of Worms, providing the moment
Carlyle described as "the greatest scene in Modern European History; the
point, indeed, from which the whole subsequent history of civilisation takes
its rise". This was where secular authority under Charles V, the Holy Roman
emperor, tried to persuade Luther to recant. He refused: the mythology has
it that this was when he pronounced: "Here I stand. I can do no other." He
was outlawed and excommunicated: but Frederick the Wise, the sympathetic
elector of Saxony, shielded him in his castle at Wartburg and, once the heat
was off, Luther set about organising his own Church on his own principles.
The secular effects of this attack on authority were soon apparent. A
peasants' revolt in parts of Germany in 1525, which for strategic reasons
Luther declined to support, showed the mood, and helped explain why in the
northern German lands, in the Low Countries and elsewhere in Europe, people
flocked to the new brand of Christianity. Lutheranism was the
anti-establishment populism of its day and a means whereby, in an age before
democracy, the unfranchised could make their voices heard.
Luther's ideas inspired, and were developed by, John Calvin, a Frenchman who
expounded his own theology from Geneva, where he had gone into exile. If we
owe Luther (among other things) the intellectual right to question and
reject authority, especially when it can be proved wrong or corrupt, we owe
Calvin the Protestant work ethic, as well as the flourishing of capitalism
and enterprise that stems from it. The left should be well aware of this
point, as it was the basis of R H Tawney's Religion and the Rise of
Capitalism, published in 1926; the right should know it through
the political economist Max Weber. Calvin saw work as a duty that the
individual owed God and fellow citizens out of gratitude for redemption
through Jesus Christ: no one had the right not to work if able to do so.
Those who shared his belief that the industrious would prosper in the
afterlife developed a culture that not only created capitalism, but
encouraged the buccaneers, pioneers and adventurers who would seek to build
empires.
Thus, as Carlyle said, the Reformation marked the moment when society
stopped caring about the moral and spiritual health of people and started to
worry about their economic and practical condition. Other historians have
put it more bluntly: it was the moment when the Middle Ages ended and the
modern world began. It brought with it ideas and attitudes such as social
mobility, an inevitable by-product of a society where work and enterprise
are promoted. Luther was in some senses highly enlightened, and his
enlightenment spread: he set an example of freedom of thought, opening up
new inquiries into science and philosophy. This establishment of the right
to individual conscience leads to the contention that our modern idea of
liberty stems from the Reformation.
Some who pursued liberty of thought and conscience in rigidly Catholic
societies, such as Galileo a century later, still struggled; yet by the time
Galileo was put under house arrest for claiming that the sun was the centre
of the solar system many were belatedly accepting Copernicus's theory of
heliocentricity, advanced around the time of the 95 Theses. The Reformation
signalled the moment when the Church lost control of science, though even
Protestants retained a prejudice, born of fear, against radical inquiry. It
was the 19th century before geology became an accepted subject of study at
English universities, for fear it would contradict what the Bible said about
the chronology of the Creation.
Luther's sense of enlightenment also led him to oppose the subjugation of
women, believing they should be able to divorce an unsatisfactory husband.
Excommunicated, he himself married a former nun, unilaterally ending the
notion that a clergyman had to be celibate. He was also deeply opposed to
slavery, an abomination whose international abolition was eventually driven
by British and American Quakers. However, there was one marked respect in
which his doctrine was anything but enlightened, and its poisonous legacy
would resonate down the centuries.
Luther had argued initially for Christians to treat Jews kindly, in the hope
of converting them; but by the 1530s he had abandoned any idea of mass
conversion and saw persecution as the only alternative. He became
unequivocally anti-Semitic and called explicitly for Jews to be removed from
all German territories, their houses and synagogues burned, and their
chattels and religious texts confiscated; they were also to be denied safe
passage as they travelled. Jews fled to eastern Europe to avoid the
privations Lutherans forced on them, congregating particularly in Catholic
Poland, and in Habsburg lands to the south and east.
Luther now condemned those Christians who helped the Jews; indeed, one
Lutheran pastor in the Alsatian town of Hochfelden ordered his congregation
to go out and murder them. A substantial Jewish community lived in
Hochfelden until 1940, when the Nazis began to deport them. Then in December
1941, six weeks before the Wannsee Conference, seven confederations of
Protestant churches in Germany announced their support for the Nazi policy
of forcing Jews to wear the Star of David. From time to time the Nazis used
Luther to justify their persecution.
Nor would this be the only form of Protestant racism. In South Africa, the
Dutch Reformed Church was explicit in its endorsement of apartheid, and
Hendrik Verwoerd, its architect, was educated by Lutherans. But racism was
not inextricable from the Reformation: in 1982 the World Alliance of
Reformed Churches, which took its main inspiration from Calvin rather than
Luther, expelled the Dutch Reformed Church and declared apartheid a sin.
Luther soon had followers among secular rulers other than Frederick the
Wise, who in 1531 formed a defensive alliance called the Schmalkaldic
League. In 1555 it forced Charles V to conclude the Peace of Augsburg,
allowing Lutheran rulers to exist within the Holy Roman empire: this
sundered Protestant Germany from Catholic Germany, a divide that persisted
until the declaration of the Second Reich in 1871. It then took until the
end of the Thirty Years War in 1648 and the Peace of Westphalia to allow
Calvinist rule, too, within the empire. In that war, 40 per cent of the
population of what is now Germany was killed, partly through plague. Eight
million people died altogether, in a series of wars that began over the
determination of Emperor Ferdinand II to renege on the Treaty of Augsburg
and impose Catholicism throughout the empire. In time, however, the war
became a conflict between the leading powers - notably the French and the
Habsburgs - squabbling over territory and influence, with Catholic France
finding it desirable for reasons of security to support the Protestants,
and with powers as far-flung as Spain and Sweden joining in.
The other consequences of Luther's Reformation were less horrific. His
translation of the Bible into the German vernacular helped standardise that
language and had a profound effect on German literacy and culture: it
founded a literary tradition that would flower after the Thirty Years War
with the Baroque period, and then produce Kant, Goethe and Schiller. Luther
was also a prolific hymn-writer. A German musical tradition that passed down
from Bach and influenced composers around Europe was greatly stimulated by
the Church he founded. The growth of literacy further fed debate and
discourse. Luther's translation of the Bible was emulated in England,
Scotland and other Protestant countries, and had a similarly galvanising
effect on culture in those lands. It was not just that, greatly helped by
printing, translation made religion more accessible and comprehensible to
the masses: greater literacy propelled freedom of speech and thought. The
Reformation provoked the greatest explosion of information, knowledge and
ideas until the arrival of the internet.
Despite his strictures against ideas promulgated by the Jews, Luther
advocated inquiry as a means of stimulating freedom of thought. Even though
he saw it as a tool of the devil, he also wanted the Quran to be freely
available so that it could be subject to scrutiny. Ironically, this spirit
of inquiry and debate did not always exist in Luther's own denomination. The
Pilgrim Fathers went to America, founding the nation as we know it and
providing perhaps one of the greatest consequences of the Reformation, only
because of the mutual intolerance of factions within Protestantism. The
emigration on the Mayflower can be traced back to the departure from the
East Midlands of early Nonconformists, who fled to Holland in 1606-07 to
escape rising persecution in the Church of England. Perhaps predictably,
when they arrived in New Plymouth they radiated loathing of other religions,
notably Catholicism, setting in place an institutional prejudice in America.
It took the United States until 1960, and the election of John F Kennedy, to
choose a Catholic president.
***
In continental Europe, the political, constitutional and economic effects of
the Reformation have been profound. In Britain, it is why Queen Elizabeth II
sits on the throne and not Franz, Duke of Bavaria, the premier descendant of
Charles I of England, who would otherwise be King Francis II. Charles I's
failure to accept the religious consequences of the Reformation helped cause
the English Civil War. The refusal of his son James II to do so brought
about the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and the Act of Settlement, preventing
the Catholic children of James and their descendants from inheriting the
throne and offering it to the distantly related House of Hanover. Thanks to
this, the monarch was taken out of British politics, with the office of
prime minister developing after 1721 to manage affairs on behalf of George I
and the role of the sovereign being steadily eroded over the next two
centuries into what we now call a constitutional monarchy.
The hostility with France from the late 17th century until 1815 was fed by
English outrage at the revocation in 1685 by Louis XIV of the Edict of
Nantes, by which Protestants had had their rights protected in France. An
estimated 50,000 of the most accomplished people in France - Calvinist
Huguenots - migrated across the Channel, forming one of the biggest waves of
immigration in English history of one group relative to the existing
population. For generations they and their descendants made a valuable
contribution to British life, setting up enclaves of weavers in Canterbury
and Spitalfields and lacemakers in Worcestershire, and also settling in
Ireland, where they became prominent both in business and in local
government.
The transfer of power from religious to secular authority in central Europe
after the Peace of Westphalia paved the way for a continent dominated in the
late 19th century by Germany, with all that would entail. It was a grotesque
perversion of history that Adolf Hitler, a lapsed Catholic, should reunite
those who were culturally German into a heathen form of the Holy Roman
empire on the Anschluss with Austria of 1938.
France passed a loi de laïcité in 1905 formally separating the state from
the power of the Roman Catholic Church; but in that country's affairs what
is still called the haute société protestante has an influence far exceeding
the proportion of Protestants in society, whether in politics, officialdom
or business. Protestants had been allowed back into France after 1789 and
the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and they applied their Calvinist work
ethic to French business. Peugeot and Hermès were founded and run by
Protestants. So, too, were some of the biggest French firms, such as the
Schlumberger industrial group, whose origins were in Alsace. Protestants are
disproportionately represented in finance and utility companies. The
relatively great wealth of northern (Protestant) Europe compared to the
Catholic south is still a matter of tension in the European Union.
A secular society such as ours naturally regards politics as driving the
course of history, but at this 500th anniversary it is right to recall what
has driven the course of politics. Martin Luther did not only change the
world: the consequences of this quarrelsome but brave monk's actions
continue to affect the world to this day. If you seek his monument, look
around you.
Simon Heffer is a columnist for the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs
Simon Heffer is a journalist, author and political commentator, who has
worked for long stretches at the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail. He has
written biographies of Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Enoch
Powell, and reviews and writes on politics for the New Statesman.
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/01/shout-awakened-nations