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LTR XII (Academic Year 1999-2000): 44-55 THE ROOTS OF THE REFORMATION 1 John R. Stephenson efore we start digging up and analysing roots, we’d better agree among ourselves which tree in the forest we intend to examine. “The Reformation” is an omnium gatherum term which refers to a whole thicket of trees of different size and shape and kind. For the truth of the matter is that at least six movements which made their mark on the religious history of the 16 th century are accommodated by historians under the umbrella commonly dubbed “The Reformation”. Nor do these various trees happily coexist in the forest of religious pluralism. Their distinct root systems have caused trees to sprout which compete for room and displace each other in a process which is far from over. Not all of them can have been divinely planted, and they do not enjoy equal access to the sun. Now “reform” was a widespread aspiration at the end of the Middle Ages, and the first half of the 15 th century saw the rise and eclipse of the star known as a General Council of the Church Universal. Gather the bishops of Western Christendom, allow input from the universities and religious orders and secular rulers, tame the Pope as a meek CEO, and the reform of the Church in head and members would surely follow. Elected at Constance to be the tool of the Council held in that city from 1414 to 1418, Martin V Colonna returned to Rome and promptly repudiated the conciliar theory. Nor was the Council of Basle able to deliver the desired goods as it sat resisting papal absolutism from 1431 to 1439. Another avenue of reform was trodden by those who vested their hopes in the vigorous exercise of the papal office. Curialism would concentrate all power in the papal court and trust a godly successor of Peter to use it well. But the line of Popes who reigned from the middle of the 15 th B century until the accession of the transitional pontiff Paul III Farnese in 1534 were grand Renaissance princes who made it thinkable for half of Europe to break its age-old bond with the Holy See. Joseph Lortz tells how, at the coronation of Leo X in 1513, statues of three naked pagan gods depicted the two previous pontificates and the one just beginning. The image of Venus represented the time of Alexander VI Borgia (1492-1503) whose conduct in office is best understood by picturing to oneself the outgoing president of the United States clad in papal vestments. A likeness of Mars, the god of war, commemorated Julius II della Rovere (1503-1513), whose military campaigns on the Italian peninsula prompted Erasmus to pen the satirical 1 This paper was delivered on the website eBiblecommentary.com on 31 October 2000.
STEPHENSON: THE ROOTS OF THE REFORMATION 45 pamphlet Julius Exclusus. The changed style of the new papacy was signalled by a statue of Athene, the goddess of the arts, whom the Medici prince Leo X would faithfully serve. 2 No impulse for churchly reform would be generated from the papacy until the major schisms of the 16 th century were firmly in place. A third mode of reform was in constant motion throughout the Middle Ages. Lord Macaulay famously pointed out that while Protestants with a programme tend to found a new church, Roman Catholics with the same inclination customarily establish new religious orders. 3 So even those for whom the levers of ultimate power were out of reach could do their part to further reform. Such renewal was sought not only by such sparkling figures as Dominic Guzman (†1221) and Francis of Assissi (†1226), but also by such obscure figures as the deacon Gerard Groote (†1384), who formed his Brethren of the Common Life in faraway Holland to live out the spirituality articulated in Imitatio Christi. The 16 th century can justly be accused of a certain reckless generosity in its superabundant fulfilment of the previous age’s yearnings for reform. Before Martin Luther became a household name Desiderius Erasmus (1469- 1536) had already drafted and widely circulated a blueprint for the reform of Christendom. Good scholarship and good morals, the ditching of scholastic in favour of classical Latin, a return to the sources of Christian and pagan antiquity, the direct study of Holy Scripture—from such planks as these did Erasmus construct a reform platform breathing the “philosophy of Christ”. Erasmus’ hopes for an end to warfare among nations were dashed as Henry VIII and Francis I turned out to be anything but peacemakers, and his blueprint for churchly reform was soon sidelined by other models. The second pattern of reform to emerge in the 16 th century took the shape of the <strong>Lutheran</strong> Reformation itself, of which much more anon. The third model of reform was proposed and enacted by Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) and John Calvin (1509-1564) and took concrete shape in the historic Reformed churches. There are good reasons for not simply subsuming the English Reformation under the Zwingli-Calvin model, but rather for placing it in its own pigeonhole as the fourth 16 th -century pattern of reformation. Moreover, historians must also take into account a fifth and a sixth such pattern in the shape of the Radicals and Anabaptists, on the one hand, and of the various components of the Counter-Reformation, on the other. The historian’s own confessional perspective will determine which of these six 2 Joseph Lortz. The Reformation in Germany, 2 vols., trans. Ronald Walls (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968) I:91. 3 See the celebrated review of Leopold von Ranke’s History of the Popes in Essays by Lord Macaulay (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1887) 586f.
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