Reformation Europe, 1517-1559 by Sir G. R. Elton

Author:Sir G. R. Elton [Elton, Sir G. R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, France, Germany, Great Britain, General
ISBN: 9781787200555
Google: XYfjDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2016-08-09T03:01:36+00:00

CHAPTER VII—THE REVIVAL OF ROME

I

In the revolutionary turmoil excited by Luther it is easy to forget that the Protestant success was never more than partial. Loud though he blew his trumpet, the paper walls of Rome (of which he spoke so eloquently in his Address to the Christian Nobility) refused to fall. However badly shaken, the papacy proved surprisingly resistant. Indeed, it is one of ‘the ironies of the age that when the dust settled the pope was found in more undisputed control of the reduced territory left to him than his predecessors had exercised over the whole Latin Church. The Reformation split the Church, but it forced Rome to organise for war, and organisation for war naturally meant giving fresh powers to the commander-in-chief. The process took time. It was affected by the continued hopes for reunion, particularly strong in Charles V, by the division in the Catholic ranks between the fanatics and the moderates—those who could see only the heresy of Protestantism and those who could not help admitting the justice of some of its charges—and by the fundamental difficulty of reforming an ancient and long corrupted institution. Nevertheless, among the more astonishing phenomena of this sufficiently astounding half-century is the revival and renewal of the papacy.

That the old faith should not everywhere surrender before the evangelism of the Protestants is understandable enough. The Reformation brought to many a message of hope and spiritual joy, but it also deprived many others, perhaps the more earth-bound, of certain reassuring instruments of grace—pilgrimages, worship of the saints, the performance of those little concrete acts that are so much easier than the strains of inner regeneration—instruments which, one cannot help thinking, are essential to the mobile vulgus if any religion is to be made supportable which stresses the prospect of hell as graphically as medieval Christianity did. Habit, need, conviction would ensure that the customs grown over 1500 years should not be swept aside overnight. But that the papacy should emerge more strengthened, that papacy for which in the age of Leo X and Clement VII even orthodox believers could at best apologise, causes rather more surprise. The resilience of Rome is a greater wonder than the resilience of the Church of Rome, until one realises that those who attacked the old Church were themselves very largely responsible for identifying tradition so indissolubly with the papacy. In fact, the history of the Reformation proves rather pressingly that the universal Church cannot be separated from the papal claim to universal supremacy. As things were, and as they are today, the two cannot but go together.

Of course, the ultimate issues did not all become clear from the first. Luther’s attack unleashed a vigorous warfare of the pen. If, on the whole, the Protestant writings are the more familiar and the more important, that reflects not only literary quality and the fact that of all these writers, many of them learned and able, Luther himself was the only propagandist of genius, but also the truth that novelty is usually more successful than mere defence of an existing order.

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