#4 The Struggle for the True Religion in Europe: The Renaissance and Reformations
What has religion got to do with economic development? Today most people think very little. But 500 years ago, most people thought the exact opposite. Religion, and particularly the Church, had a great deal to say about production and services. It is widely accepted by historians of the period that the upending of the Catholic Church during the Protestant Reformation was a major influence in what I have termed ‘turning the world upside down’. Or, put another way, the Protestant Reformation was revolutionary across Western Europe in how people thought about and acted on relations with each other and to nature.
Take a step backwards and for a moment ask the question: what constitutes religion? Religion is far away more important than a belief in God and it constitutes more than simply faith alone. Religion determines people’s social relations. Religion throughout the world has always been about how human beings interpret the world. It provides the ideas about our relationships with each other, as well as our relationship to the earth and nature, and our relationship to the sun, the moon and the stars. These three relationships are the core of all religions. Through formalising these relationships, we call the ideas religion. Humans have created a myriad of religions and it is common to all humankind; all seek to explain and act on these fundamental relationships of living. In many respects, this is what it is to be human.
At the centre of all religions are ideas and action. If we are to understand how the Europeans turned our world upside down over the 16th, 17 and 18th centuries we need to grasp how and why the ideas in Christianity, the dominant religion in all of Europe, were vital for understanding the revolutionary changes that occurred. The shorthand for these changes is usually contained in the concepts of Renaissance and Reformation.
In this blog, I shall discuss the ideas within Protestantism which unintentionally provided the ideological conditions that allowed capitalism to be built. The Reformation of Luther and Calvin was intended to protest the corruption within the Catholic church of the time. In practice, the new ‘Protestantism’ created the conditions that enabled the development of private property, the lynchpin of capitalism.
The title of this blog is the struggle for the true religion. Parallel struggles today can be found within Islam. During the 16th, 17th and part of the 18th centuries, religious struggles led to violent internal wars across much of Europe. In the end, the Protestant religion won the day and has lived uneasily with Catholicism ever since. Over time, as capitalism has come to be the accepted norm and we are familiar with the separation of Church and State, this has led the religion being just one more institution. But at the time of the Reformation, life and religion were inseparable.
Religion was altered in Western Europe over 250 years in what has been called the ‘Reformation’. Ideas that were fought over in a period of tumultuous change. The growth of the Protestant religion enveloped much of Western Europe.
After the spread of the Protestant Reformation in Europe from 1517, religious warfare had become commonplace across the continent. These wars were supposed to have ended after the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) when approximately a third of the total population of Western Europe was killed. Although the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 had ended the Pope's dominant European hold of the Catholic Church, religious wars continued well into the 18th century.
The Protestant Reformation and the subsequent religious wars had secular consequences far beyond the improvement of weapons, which is dealt with in future blogs. The early invaders, from the 1490s, were from Catholic Spain and Portugal. The second phase of invasions carried out by the English, French and Dutch began as trading but soon turned into colonial invasions from the early 1600s. The European internal religious wars between the older Catholics led by the Pope and the new revolutionary Protestants extended into external trading, settling and fighting between the various Europeans in the Americas.
The years from the advent of Luther in 1517 to 1648 represent the period that has been called the Reformation. These were years when the new Protestant regimes threw off the ideological rules of the Catholics and the Pope and replaced them with Protestant ideas and order. Much that had previously been solely religious became secular and the new Protestant order opened the way to new scientific thinking as well as military technology.
The Protestant movement had started outside the control of Kings and Princes, but once the new religion had been accepted, the Catholic Church lost their lands and the right to tithes (taxes). The new Protestant kings were enriched. At the time the movement was revolutionary. Simultaneously, there was the development of the Caxton printing press. Printing made spreading the Protestant word of God easier as learning to read and education could be extended beyond a tiny religious Catholic elite. The ideas of the Protestants became the basis of thinking outside and beyond the limits set by the Catholic Church. Slowly, natural science permeated thinking and the new technologies, which were the basis of the industrial revolution from the 1750s onwards.
In 1492 in Catholic Spain, that is 25 years earlier than Luther, the church and monarch expelled large numbers of Jews and Muslims. There followed internal violence to ensure those that remained were true believers of the Catholic faith. This violence continued into the 16th and 17th centuries, where religious wars spread across most of Europe. By 1750 – that is 150 years after the start of the new ideas from the Reformation – the religious and colonial wars became intermixed.
Luther and then Calvin provided a new and original Christian ideology to challenge the European Catholic church. Monarchs waged wars against their peoples to ensure religious purity. Those who did not conform were subjected to levels of violence and cruelty that we find hard to understand today. These were not sudden aberrations, but wars that continued regularly from the 16th to the end of the 18th century throughout much of Europe.
It is in these conditions that we need to understand the slow ending of the feudal system and the beginning of the new industrial capitalist world order. Europe, and more particularly Britain, Holland, and, after 1815, France and Germany, move from one system of production to another. These movements were often violent and turbulent for the people. But the end of the feudal order was a necessary condition for the introduction of an industrial urban revolution and the move towards constant changes that characterised 19th century Europe and North America.
The growth and expansion of the major European nations over these 350 years from 1492 altered the pattern of the world's dynamic forever. Over these years, Europeans borrowed scientific knowledge from the East and developed it further for themselves. They developed shipbuilding and navigation across oceans. Then they created the internal combustion engine which drove machinery and provided the means to produce goods on a scale unimaginable before. All of this is well known and thoroughly researched, and as a result, I shall gloss over many of these changes throughout these blogs.
The ideas involved in the struggle for the ‘true religion’ cannot be fully appreciated without an understanding of race and racism. The expansion of colonies and the brutalising of different parts of the world could not have taken place without a justifying set of ideas which perpetrators believed were genuinely true. The ideas around racial thought formed the glue that held the entire colonial edifice together. The British, French and Americans, as well as the Germans, all thought of themselves as the master race: a superior people that had God-given rights to rule the whole of the world.
What is the relationship between racism and religion? This question is not easy or straightforward to answer, and I can only touch upon it here, although I return to this theme in future blogs. From 1492, until post-1945, and indeed some might argue up to the present day, the ideas that constitute racism have been indelibly connected to Christianity. The precise relationship between race and religion has altered substantially over this period.
When the Spanish first crossed the Atlantic after 1492 and invaded what is to today Mexico, the invaders were uncertain whether the people they found were truly human beings like themselves. So, as I discuss later in another blog, they asked the Pope’s views. At this time, the Pope considered Christians, then Catholics, as humans. Others outside of Christianity were less than human and could be treated accordingly unless they became Christians.
That view remained dominant over the next 300 years. It followed that it provided justification that African peoples could be enslaved for they were not Christians. The view that non-Christians were lesser peoples or not truly human dominated European thought over this period. The idea that the British or the French could be the ‘master race’ developed as the common sense of the time. It followed that unless people were Christianised they could not be ‘civilised’.
From around 1800, as Shipping technologies improved, so Missionaries began to follow the flags of the colonising nations. Racism and Christianity crystallised the ideology of the superiority of the invading states. Just as Protestantism led to capitalism, so racism provided the ideological glue which held these revolutionary changes together.
Appendices
Religion and Knowledge, Science and the World
These blogs cover a five-hundred-year period of history when explanation and understanding –religion and science – changed dramatically. It is useful to briefly illustrate how religion and science altered across this period.
As a fair generalisation, human beings have always attempted to explain and understand their place in the world. Through that understanding, they have attempted to affect the world around them. The great historically written religions have always been Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism. Each is thousands of years old, and all cover every aspect of living and more. Equally ancient are hundreds, if not thousands, of other religions which did not have their belief systems formally written down. All religions have in common, whether written or unwritten, an explanation about the origins of the world, human being’s place in it, and how to behave with each other and with all other living beings.
At the beginning of this 500-year story, in 1492, religion, knowledge, politics – all aspects of being alive – were considered as a whole. For instance, nobody considered that politics and society were separate entities. Knowledge was considered to be relatively static; for Christians, it came from the Bible; for Islam, it came from the Koran. It was considered heresy to question such truths.
In Europe, Copernicus, (1492-1543), Galileo (1564-1642), and Newton (1642-1729) examined the sun, moon and the stars, and began to come up with ideas that challenged biblical knowledge. The Arab world, as well as the Chinese, had already come up with similar conclusions. From these observations and astronomical techniques came mathematics, and the technical knowledge of science, navigation and medicine developed. Europe was late on the scene, and so began with translating Islamic books. Out of this, new systematic methodological principles, mathematics, and scientific methods developed.
Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam had accepted similar scientific principles and integrated them into their existing system of religious living. Under Islamic rule in the 8th and 9th century AD, the educated elites in Baghdad translated Greek scientific books into Arabic; they developed the Chinese system of papermaking and built observatories to watch the heavens.
It is easy to imagine the widespread interest among scholars to this day in these intellectual developments. By the 17th century in Europe, these scientific developments were on a par with Greek and Arabic predecessors, yet the concept of science did not then exist. And while what we now call scientific enquiry continued to exist and expand, in religion few questioned that the two could not co-exist.
If it had not been for the Lutheran split in the Catholic Church, it is feasible that Europe might have developed along parallel lines to China, India or the Arab world. We can date accurately when religious and scientific knowledge began to separate. With the advent of Calvin and Luther in 1517, these two monks in the German-speaking lands began to challenge the Pope in Rome. Out of these splits came Protestantism, and out of Protestantism, religion came to be a separate organisation and entity, as we know it today.
Although we date the splitting of religion and science from 1517, nobody living then and for hundreds of years after would have accepted a split between the Christian Gods and science. Historical hindsight is a wonderful tool. Protestantism provided the ideological tool through which this split became a reality.
Over the early centuries when science was studied, it was an elite occupation and for long years did not truly impinge on mainstream society. But we know that science and the technologies that arose were the engine of change. Ideologically, it brought with its rationality, calculation, observation, empirical enquiry and experimentation, expanding change ever more rapidly, where once there had been stasis. Slowly the imagination moved to the future and nature itself was transformed. Sooner or later science would challenge religion as the way to understand the world.
I discuss the key to the complex subject of how ethics, money, and religion came to be understood separately in future blogs. At the heart of these changes stood the axis of humanity’s relationship with God and through him to nature. The very axis on which all humans have stood from time immemorial had begun to shift. God began to be understood as just one more institution among many others.
The Renaissance
The Renaissance occurred roughly between the 14th and 17th centuries. It was a movement that is supposed to have begun in Italy and then moved into all of Europe. New thinking manifested itself in architecture, politics, science, literature and painting. The Renaissance is a cultural movement based on classics from Greek and Rome, and the importance of a kind of science that relies on observation rather than cultural history. Several polymaths are regularly used to illustrate forward-thinking, including Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Following the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Ottomans, scholars and Arabic and Greek texts are said to have migrated to Italy, especially to Venice, Genoa, Milan, Bologna and Rome. It is argued that the Renaissance paved the way for Protestant Reformation.
The Reformation
The Reformation began in 1517 with Martin Luther. It is said to have ended in 1647 with the end of the 30 Years War, which laid to waste much of Europe. Luther aimed to reform the Catholic Church. His 95 Theses arrived at a pivotal moment in European history. The land-owning military aristocracy was often at loggerheads with a highly discontented peasantry and rich merchants in the towns. The ruling aristocracy ruled alongside the Catholic Church, personified through the Holy Ruling Empire (the Holy Ruling Empire lasted 1000 years, it was abolished in 1815, and included most of the German-speaking lands and south-west to modern-day Italy). The Holy Ruling Empire of the Pope constituted a very large part of Europe as a whole.
Religion and power were combined at the time into a single whole. Lutheran reforms broke this apart. Lutheran churches were founded in much of northern Europe which included German states, the Baltics, Britain and Scandinavia. It excluded Ireland, Poland and Lithuania. Most of southern Europe remained Catholic, especially much of France, Spain, Portugal and Italy. Britain was influenced by the Reformation after 1547. A counter-revolution followed, led by the Jesuits. The struggles created the notion of a 'true religion’ and 'false doctrines' which lasted well beyond 1647.
Further Reading
The History of Science:
David Wooton, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution, Penguin 2016
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press 1962
Ed Husain, The House of Islam: A Global History, Bloomsbury, 2018
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By the time of the French Revolution in 1789, the Americas had been invaded, slavery had been introduced on an industrial scale and the eradication of the native populations was well underway. Africa was being denuded of its young people and the process of impoverishing India had started. The balance of the world’s power and wealth had shifted and reversed. The wealth of China, India and the rest of Asia would be radically diminished, all on a historically unprecedented scale.