The Unintended Reformation, part 1

I have been meaning for some time to write a review of Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation, which came out five years ago now and attracted a lot of attention. Reformation scholars, at least those focusing on theology, have, generally, panned the book, while Catholic apologists of course find it red meat.

Personally, I greeted it with delight when I first began to read it, as the book I would have wished to write myself if I had had the time and the learning to do so. On soberer analysis, it certainly has significant faults, and many of the objections that reviewers have raised are entirely valid. Nonetheless, I find the central thesis hard to dispute. No doubt some of this derives from my youthful exposure to the writing of Chesterton, but my years of studying the Reformation with David Steinmetz tended to confirm rather than refute that early impression. (It is only fair to say that Steinmetz himself was not a fan of Gregory's book--indeed the last conversation I ever had with him was in large part an argument on this very subject.)

The thesis is quite simple and is stated by the subtitle of the book: "How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society." Gregory argues that the division caused by the Reformation--the breakdown of the broad consensus on the basic questions of life that had characterized the Middle Ages--contributed decisively to the rise of a society in which these questions would be answered in secular ways, and indeed in which no coherent and unified answers would be possible. He articulates this in six specific ways, to each of which he dedicates a chapter:
1. Metaphysics (Excluding God): division over the proper understanding of divine revelation led Europeans to fall back on an already existing concept of God as the "greatest being" within a rationally comprehensible universe, a view of God which (unlike the more orthodox, apophatic view that had previously prevailed) would turn out to be "excluded" by the rise of modern science.
2. Epistemology (Relativizing Doctrines): division over what the proper doctrines were led inevitably to skepticism and relativism about the possibility of ultimate truth.
3. Politics (Controlling the Churches): the breakdown of a unified Church led to governmental control of religion, and eventually to the exclusion of religion from public life
4. Ethics (Subjectivizing Morality): The relativization of doctrinal claims, combined with the Protestant rejection of traditional Catholic soteriology and ethics, led to the breakdown of moral consensus described by Alistair MacIntyre in After Virtue.
5. Economics (Manufacturing the Goods Life): All of these previous developments, combined with the sheer chaos and violence of Reformation-era warfare, led to an unleashing of greed that, freed from the restraints of traditional Christian ethics, created modern capitalist society.
6. Secularizing Knowledge: The traditional understanding of education as a quest for truth beneath the broad umbrella of the Church turned into a purely secular quest for objective, rational knowledge, which, as in other areas of modern society, eventually broke down into subjectivism and pragmatism.

In subsequent posts, I'll look at each of these chapters in detail. But first I want to say something about Gregory's basic methodology, which I think has often been overlooked or simply dismissed contemptuously by his critics.

In his first book, Salvation at Stake, Gregory took on what he saw as reductive, secularist, theory-driven approaches to the phenomenon of martyrdom (specifically martyrdom at the hands of other Christians in the Reformation era). He insisted that we must attempt to understand sixteenth-century people on their own terms rather than claiming to understand them better than they understood themselves. This created a great kerfuffle at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, but many Protestants as well as Catholics appreciated his respect for sixteenth-century Christians of all stripes. (In fact, I couldn't tell from the book that he was Catholic). While many Protestants have seen The Unintended Reformation as nothing more than Catholic propaganda, it needs to be understood in terms of his overall project of rescuing Reformation history from reductivism and what Gregory calls "supersessionism" (the view that our present inevitably followed from the past and is superior to it). Gregory sees the hyper-specialization of historical scholarship as an obstacle to serious, respectful analysis of the collective choices that made history take one turn rather than another. He is trying to do a kind of meta-history that all the scholarly fashions of our time militate against. Hence, I think that a lot of the criticisms misfire. We need to consider first whether, in fact, what he's trying to do can and should be done, and then whether he has, overall, succeeded in doing it (if it should be done).

I think that what he's trying to do is ambitious and, in the nature of things, impossible to do perfectly. He's working at such a large scale of generalization that he's certain to make a lot of mistakes--and he does. He also has a tendency to be overly grandiose and combative in tone (which got him in trouble with the previous book as well), and this puts people's backs up. But I think his book is, on the whole, a much-needed trumpet blast waking us up from the slumber of hyper-specialization and dreary reductionism.

One possible criticism is that while he argued in the previous book for understanding past figures on their own terms, in this book he claims that, in a way, he understands what happened in the Reformation better than the Reformers did. But I think Gregory would respond that he's not claiming that their actions were "really" something other than they thought they were, but simply that their sincere religious reforming efforts led to consequences down the road. And that is, as far as it goes, correct. Nonetheless, there are places where Gregory does seem to impose a "metanarrative" that distorts what the Reformers themselves thought they were doing. The first chapter of the book, on which a lot of reviews have concentrated, is unfortunately one of the major examples of this, as I'll explore in the next entry.

Saving the embryos: a new variation on the "trolley problem"

My friend David Schell has asked me (and several other prolifers he knows) to respond to the viral post describing Patrick Tomlinson's supposedly deadly challenge to the prolife position. Several good responses have already been written, including some fine posts on David's FB page. Here's mine.

In Tomlinson's scenario, we have a choice between saving a five-year-old child or 1000 embryos from a fire. This is, of course, a variant of the "trolley problem," and as in all such dilemmas, the situation is made artificially simple and stark. Tomlinson claims that no prolife person has ever said they would save the embryos, and that this proves that prolife people don't really believe that life begins at conception.

First of all, as others have pointed out, it's absurd to claim that if other people would act, under pressure, in ways that don't seem compatible with their declared beliefs, then they don't really hold those beliefs and you don't need to deal with the intellectual arguments for them. That reflects a very shallow understanding of human psychology, and perhaps a certain desperation to dismiss the actual philosophical arguments for life beginning at some point before birth.

Tomlinson's argument needs to be refined: rather than asking whether one would save the child or the embryos, he should ask which the prolifer thinks should be saved. That of course weakens the conflict he wants to create between prolifers' instincts and their alleged principles. But the fact that Tomlinson's original argument was specious isn't my fault. And it's still a dilemma--I feel considerable reluctance to say that it would be morally right to let a child die in order to save embryos. And here Tomlinson is right: this is because I, personally, am more certain a five-year-old child is a human being than I am that an embryo is a human being. It does not follow from this that there are no good reasons to protect embryonic life. Under pressure, in such a stark dilemma, I would most likely save (and think it right to save) the child. It does not follow that it is right to destroy embryos deliberately.

Like most polemicists on both sides, Tomlinson chooses the extreme example that suits his side of the argument. There is a wide range of room for "moderate" positions in which life begins at some point between conception and birth, and we aren't sure which. Thus, even if his example proved everything he might wish, it would not follow that life does not begin until birth.

But the biggest problem with Tomlinson's scenario, and with all variants of the trolley problem, it its utilitarianism. Tomlinson assumes that he's made the point especially strong by using a thousand embryos instead of just one. Some counter-arguments assume that the moral situation would be radically altered if, for instance, the embryos were essential to the continuation of the human race, or if instead of a five-year-old child the alternative was to save an old and sick person.

One of the fundamental moral principles which secular moralists (and some religious moralists too) seem to have abandoned in our culture is that the value of human life is not numerate. (There is, for instance, an entire moral argument against empathy on the grounds that empathy is "innumerate.") Of course, if we can save several lives rather than one, then all things being equal, we should do so. But because human life is of infinite value, multiplying the number of humans at stake does not fundamentally change the moral situation. Not only would it be legitimate, under many circumstances, to save one person rather than a thousand--but often it would be morally obligatory to do so.

If I had a choice between saving one of my daughters and saving a thousand people who were not close family members, I would save my daughter. And I would not think of this as an act of moral weakness. On the contrary, I would think it wrong to make the opposite choice. I have an overriding moral obligation to protect and nurture my children. That doesn't mean that I think their lives are more valuable than those of others--but they aren't less valuable either, and all human life is of infinite value.

A further basic error of a lot of modern secular ethics is the belief that action and inaction are morally equivalent. This stems from utilitarian consequentialism--the idea that what matters most is the result of our actions. Thus, if I let someone die or kill them, the result is the same so the moral quality of the act is the same. This is nonsense and leads to impossible moral dilemmas. And as Ben Shapiro has pointed out, it's implicit in this scenario's argument--that the choice to allow embryos to be destroyed in order to save a child makes moral objections to actively killing unborn children insincere.

In a real, plausible situation, the decision would almost certainly not boil down to two sharply opposed possibilities with the certainty that whichever I saved would live and whichever I didn't would die. My decision as to which of two lives (or groups of human lives) to save would depend on all kinds of factors: my responsibility to one or the other party, the helplessness and vulnerability of the parties, the possibility that others might save one or other of them, the likelihood that I would be able to save them, my physical proximity to them, and, yes, the relative numbers involved and the probable effect of saving or not saving those particular lives.

In short, this argument does have some value in making prolifers question whether we are really as sure that an embryo is a human person as we are that a five-year-old child is a person. But it does not do the work that Mr. Tomlinson and his many fans want it to do. But it is doing something else valuable--provoking all of us to think through more carefully why we believe what we believe and just what we mean when we say that human life has value.

Celebrating the Reformation: a reply to Sarah Condon

The Episcopal priest Sarah Condon has just written a defiant blog post expressing her frustration with (male) Protestant clergy who mourn the Reformation. She gives three basic reasons (or sets of reasons) for celebrating the Reformation:

1. Women can be ordained and clergy can be married (openly and legally--she points out correctly that a large number of medieval priests lived in illicit but tacitly accepted relationships with women, and that the women involved were called "whores" and had a low social status).

2. The Reformation allowed people to hear the Gospel of God's grace clearly and the Bible was translated into vernacular languages.

3. Sometimes God calls us to "burn it all down," pouring out his judgment on the established order. (Obviously this is dependent on the previous two points.)

To the first point: Rev. Condon says with certainty that we know that women would not be ordained if the Reformation had not occurred. Pope John Paul II would, of course, agree with her. But then, Rev. Condon doesn't agree with the Pope's reasons for thinking this (i.e., that the ordination of women is theologically impossible). From a purely historical point of view, I think the matter is much less certain than she claims. One of the big mistakes Protestants (and secular post-Protestants) make about Catholicism is to assume that Counter-Reformation Catholicism is what Catholicism would have been like if not for the Reformation (at least in all the aspects they consider bad--they are happy to take credit for what they consider real reform). Kingsley Amis' novel The Alteration is a really good example of this. We simply don't know what would have happened if Protestants had rejected schism as a means of reform. Maybe they would all have been stamped out without much trace, but I suspect not. And with regard to clerical marriage, where Condon makes the same claim, I'm fairly sure not. The possibility of allowing married clergy was seriously batted about in the Reformation era among Catholics, particularly as a means of healing the growing schism. One of the reasons it didn't happen was that schism happened anyway, and the Catholic Church adopted a very hostile attitude to signature Protestant demands even when there wasn't a clear doctrinal reason to do so. I am reasonably confident that there would be married clergy in the Catholic Church today if Protestants had pulled back from the doctrinal and liturgical demands that were genuinely incompatible with the Tradition and had doubled down on practical reforms. More on that later. First, a few more points about women and the Reformation.

Rev. Condon seems to follow a line of scholarship, which was once very common, holding that the Reformation was a liberating movement for women. She points to the role Katy Luther played in sometimes arguing theology with Luther and his friends and students. (From the quotes I remember in the Table Talk, I think she's exaggerating a bit--my memory is that Katharina played the role of the sympathetic and common-sense "uneducated woman" whose views were recorded with a bit of a patronizing smile--but I could be wrong, and Rev. Condon is right that at least they were recorded and she had her say.) But there's another approach, which has on the whole been more dominant in recent decades, I think (at least it seemed so when I was in grad school and I don't think it's waned since), which emphasizes the ways in which the Reformation doubled down on patriarchy. Lyndal Roper's book The Holy Household on the Reformation in Augsburg is one of the key works arguing this position, though her arguments have not been accepted without controversy. Amy Leonard has documented the stories of German nuns in the Reformation era who resisted the efforts of (male) Protestant clergy to "liberate" them from their vocations. (Of course there were other nuns, such as Katharina von Bora, who did find Protestantism liberating. But their stories may not be as typical as Protestant propaganda has claimed.) Sometimes these efforts were quite coercive and even, at least by threat, violent.

The Protestant Reformers by and large argued that women's only vocation was within the household. Martin Bucer objected to Catholic veneration of Mary in part because it made her a powerful figure in her own right over against her husband, whereas Bucer insisted that after the miraculous events of Jesus' birth Mary lived the life of a perfect and obedient housewife and should only be celebrated in that context. Luther said in his treatise on The Estate of Marriage (1522) that women were created to bear children and that it didn't matter if this wore them down and shortened their lives. (To be fair, as this Protestant website points out, he also said that childbearing was healthy for women and that it was better to have a short life in good health than a long life in bad health.) In medieval Catholicism, on the other hand, women often exercised powerful social roles with considerable independence from men. They weren't priests, true, but they were abbesses, anchorites, hospital workers. . . . There is a lot of evidence of women resisting the Reformation because their spirituality was focused on the very shrines and rituals that the Protestants destroyed. And yes, there are other examples of iconoclastic women who mocked Catholic piety by saying that they could piss as holy water as the priest could make, and so on. It's complicated--far more complicated than Rev. Condon's desire for celebration allows.

I am married to an Episcopal priest myself, so I understand how important vocation is. I understand that Rev. Condon probably experiences her vocation in a way that this particular essay does not do justice to. But as it stands, her way of speaking about it sounds like a confirmation of what many conservative Catholics and conservative Anglicans say, that women want ordination as an expression of personal power. It sounds as if she is saying "the unity of the Church doesn't matter--what matters is that I get what I want." Again, I'm sure that there's more to her sense of vocation than this, but in this particular piece of writing it doesn't come through, at least to me.

Her snarky and witty style no doubt contributes to this. But to be honest, this is one of my problems with the whole piece. I appreciate Rev. Condon's lively writing, but her rhetorical approach (indicated by the title, for starters) is of a piece with a general trend in our culture that I think is deeply toxic. The willingness to flout other people's sensibilities, to glory in being offensive, to jeer at what others hold sacred--I think we are drowning in these things already. I don't think more of this is needed, however justified Rev. Condon may find her particular cause. I know that many conservative Catholics and Anglicans treat ordained women this way. I can only say, inadequate as Rev. Condon will find it, that I protest passionately against it when I run into it. I think her anger and snark are understandable. I don't think they are particularly convincing to anyone not already in her corner. But perhaps she doesn't intend them to be.

As an Anglican priest, Rev. Condon presumably confesses regularly her faith in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. I don't see how she can reconcile that profession with the cavalier way in which she mocks those (she claims they are all male, but I doubt that) who care about unity. Yes, of course, unity must be unity in truth and justice. But a love of unity itself is not something to be ashmed of.

Rev. Condon's second point is that the Reformation restored a proper understanding of grace. (She also claims that the Reformation is responsible for the Bible being in the vernacular, which ignores the multiple translations in multiple European languages that existed before the Reformation.) This isn't the place to deal with this claim, which is of course the basic Protestant claim and is a solid reason to celebrate the Reformation if true. Indeed, since I think the Reformation did give us some fresh insights on grace, it's a reason why I do celebrate aspects of the Reformation (but not the schism). But Reformation theology, taken "straight," does not liberate grace so much as segregate it. "Law" is allowed to reign in the affairs of this world, but banished from the Gospel. I don't think that's Biblical. The Sermon on the Mount is at the heart of the Gospel, as the Gospels themselves define it. Here's a basic challenge for Rev. Condon and other defenders of the Reformation: does racial justice belong to law or Gospel? Or, in other words, is a church that proclaims and practices racial segregation preaching the true Gospel?

Her final point is that sometimes God wants us to burn everything down. I think she's wrong there. Yes, there is divine judgment. Biblically, the harshest proclamations of judgment are against God's own people. The problem with "burning it all down" is that you are repudiating your former people and starting a new people, who presumably don't deserve God's judgment. But the new people always do too. After 500 years, is it really still credible to claim that the endless sequence of burning it all down that has marked Protestant history is God's will? But perhaps Rev. Condon doesn't mean that. She is, after all, an Anglican, a tradition distinguished from most other Protestant traditions precisely by its level of continuity with the past. So what does she actually mean by "burning it all down"? Wouldn't that, logically, lead her to abandon Anglicanism itself? (Not that I want her to do that--but she's not going to listen to me anyway!)

High and Low

High and Low is a 1963 movie by Akira Kurosawa which I saw a few days ago. It's a modern police procedural, with the rather cliched plot of a kidnapper who taunts the father of his victim by phone and seems to have uncanny abilities to see what his target is doing. (Actually, perhaps it wasn't cliched in 1963.)

Except that the target of the extortion demand, played by Toshiro Mifune, isn't actually the father of the victim. The kidnapper has accidentally snatched the chauffeur's son instead. This sets up the fundamental moral conflict of the film. Will Mifune's character, a prosperous shoe manufacturer named about to clinch an important deal that will give him control of the company he works for, give up his professional ambitions by paying the massive ransom demanded by the kidnapper and thus plunge himself into debt. (Mifune has mortgaged everything he owns in order to raise the money for the buyout that will give him control of the company, and this is the money he would need to use to pay the kidnapper.) This makes the film more than just a taut procedural--though it is certainly that.

The moral challenge Mifune faces is presented in heavy-handed terms right after the kidnapping, when he thinks his son has been taken and declares, without hesitation, that of course he will pay whatever it takes to get him back. But Mifune's character is not cold-hearted or unsympathetic. He has worked his way to the position he has, although we find out eventually that he also owes a good deal of his status to his wife's inherited money. At the beginning of the movie, he is confronting the directors of the company over their desire to make shoddy, flashy shoes instead of the solid work he wants to turn out. Kurosawa first gives us a conflict between good and bad capitalism, and then casts doubt even on the "good capitalism."

The title of the film in Japanese, apparently, translates more literally as "Heaven and hell." It turns out that the kidnapper is motivated primarily by envy of Mifune's literally exalted status in a beautiful house on a hill overlooking Yokohama. Mifune hasn't done anything to hurt the kidnapper, and the latter's rage seems irrational, but Kurosawa makes us empathize with him in spite of our horror at his actions.

It may be relevant that in Buddhism, unlike Christianity, heaven and hell are temporary destinations. Gods, who live in heaven, are beings who have achieved happiness through their good actions in previous lives, just as Mifune has worked his way from a simple craftsman to a position of wealth and privilege. But in Buddhism, being a "god" is not a particularly desirable thing. The gods are typically unaware of the temporary nature of their bliss. Eventually they too will have to descend from the heights. Enlightenment results not simply from good actions, but from an awareness of the temporary, contingent nature of all reality, even apparently secure bliss. In Mahayana Buddhism, the spiritual ideal is the "bodhisattva," who takes a vow not to enter Nirvana until every other creature in the universe has been enlightened as well. At the end of the movie, having lost his fortune but gained a position with a smaller company where he can do the kind of work he wants to do, Mifune visits the kidnapper in prison. While the film ends on a somber note with the kidnapper's howls of rage and despair, Mifune's trajectory is a redemptive one for himself at least, from arrogant assumption of superiority to compassionate presence with someone who has done him (and others) great evil.