The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

  And as society altered to accommodate these developments, religion would also have to change. At this point, faith still pervaded the whole of life and had not yet been confined to a distinct sphere. But secularization was beginning. A centralized state was crucial to productivity and, like Ferdinand and Isabella, rulers all over Europe began the difficult process of welding separate kingdoms into modern nation-states. Princes, such as Henry VII of England (1457–1509) and Francis I of France (1494–1547), adopted policies designed to reduce the influence of the Church and subordinate it to their own political goals. The increasing role of banks, stock companies, and stock exchanges, over which the Church had no control, also eroded its power. This steadily unstoppable trend, which pushed religion into a separate, marginal place in society, would be felt in all kinds of obscure ways that were never fully articulated. Secularization would be accelerated by three crucial and formative sixteenth-century movements: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. These were not disconnected or rival projects. They influenced one another in the same way as the other innovations of the period; all three reflected the emerging early modern Zeitgeist and were pervaded by the religious ethos.

  The reduced role of the Church did not mean that people were becoming disenchanted with their faith; on the contrary, they were probably more religious than they had been in the medieval period. Religion was involved in the modernization process at every level and would affect and be affected by the escalating spiral of social, political, and scientific change. The humanism of the Renaissance, for example, was deeply religious. The Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) wanted to read the scriptures in the original languages and translate them into a more elegant Latin, and his textual work was of immense importance to the reformers. Renaissance art benefited from the anatomical drawings of Andreas Vesalius (1515–64). Other painters exploited the new mathematical understanding of space: in their own field, they were striving for a vision that was as rational as the dawning scientific ethos. The technical inventions of the period helped artists achieve an empirical accuracy and fidelity to nature that was unprecedented, based on the depiction of objects viewed from a single, objective perspective and placed in relation to one another in a unified space.14 But this “objectivity” did not mean an abandonment of the transcendent: this “scientific art” achieved a numinous vision, just as early modern scientists sought a solution that was elegant, aesthetic, and redolent of the divine.15

  Renaissance religion recoiled from the arid theology of the late scholastics and had absorbed the personalized emphasis of much fourteenth-century spirituality. Lorenzo Valla (1405–57) had already stressed the futility of mixing sacred truth with “tricks of dialectics” and “metaphysical quibbles.”16 The humanists wanted the kind of emotive religion described by the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch (1304–74), who had argued that “theology is actually poetry, poetry concerning God,” effective not because it “proved” anything but because it reached the heart.17 The humanists’ textual study of the New Testament was part of their attempt to return, like any premodern reformers, ad fontes, to the “wellsprings” of their tradition, shaking off the medieval legacy in order to rediscover the gospels and the fathers of the Church. They were particularly drawn to the affective spirituality of Paul and Augustine, whom they revered not as doctrinal authorities, but as individuals like themselves, who had embarked on a highly personal and emotional quest. The humanists were largely responsible for creating the concept of the individual that would be crucial to the modern ethos. Only a person free of communal, social, or dogmatic shibboleths could innovate freely, experiment boldly, reject established authority, and risk the possibility of error. The hero of the early modern period was the explorer, who could penetrate new realms of thought and experience independently but was ready to cooperate with others.

  Even though they were conscious of their great achievements, the humanists nevertheless retained a traditional sense of the limitations of the human mind; their study of the early Christian writers and the classical authors of Greece and Rome, whose world had been so different from their own, had made them aware not only of the diversity of human affairs but of the way all ideas and attitudes—including their own—were indelibly influenced by historical and cultural conditions.18 Current norms could never be absolute.19 The reports of explorers, who brought back tales of civilizations that were based on quite different premises, had also enlarged their sympathies. The humanists had a passionate interest in rhetoric, fine speech, and the arts of persuasion, and Aristotle had taught them to examine the particular context of any given argument. Instead of simply concentrating on what was said, it was essential to understand how local circumstances affected any truth. Here humanists represented the more liberal ethos of modernity.

  But in their emphatic rejection of Scotus, Ockham, and the medievals, they also represented the intolerant strain of the modern spirit.20 As philosophy, science, and technology progressed, the rejection of the recent past would seem essential to the discovery of new truth. Rapid economic and technological changes, the challenge of bringing order to the new nation-states, and the fluctuations of distant markets, as well as reports of the exotic New World, all encouraged people to put tradition to one side and seek wholly novel solutions to their unprecedented problems. But this could also lead to a wholesale dismissal of apparently outmoded ideas and attitudes. The humanists were convinced they were on the side of progress, and they were right. “Everything that surrounds us is our own work, the work of man,” said the fifteenth-century biblical scholar Gionozo Manetti, “and when we see these marvels, we realise that we are able to make better things, more beautiful things, better adorned, more perfect than those we have made until now.”21 It did not follow, however, that the medieval approach to art, literature, or religion had been entirely misguided; it had just reflected a different world. In religious matters, the modern tendency to wipe the slate clean to begin again, while understandable, would ultimately be detrimental.

  The three great Protestant reformers, Martin Luther (1483–1546), Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), and John Calvin (1509–64), all exemplified this vehement rejection of the immediate past. Like the Renaissance humanists, they had no time for the natural theology of the late scholastics and wanted a more personal and immediate faith. Zwingli and Calvin, indeed, remained humanists throughout their lives, their religious reform largely inspired by the Renaissance zeitgeist. At this time of massive change, there was a good deal of religious uncertainty. People were not able to be religious in the same way as the medievals. But where could they hear the authentic voice of Christianity?22 The reformers were trying to articulate a religious mood that was strongly felt but had not yet been adequately conceptualized. Their Reformation was just one expression of the Great Western Transformation.23 Instead of being regarded as the instigator of change, Luther should rather be seen as the spokesman of a current trend.

  Historians used to think that the Reformation was primarily a reaction to the corruption of the Church, but there seems to have been a spiritual revival in Europe at this time, especially among the laity, who now felt empowered to criticize abuses that had previously passed without comment. As society changed, ideas and rituals that had been religiously viable before the advent of modernity became suddenly abhorrent.24 Instead of giving people a sense of life’s transcendent possibilities, they caused only anxiety. Luther memorably expressed this alienation from older practices.

  Although I lived a blameless life as a monk, I felt that I was a sinner with an uneasy conscience before God. I also could not believe that I had pleased him with my works. … I was a good monk, and kept my order so strictly that if ever a monk could get to heaven by monastic discipline, I was that monk. All my companions in the monastery would confirm this. … And yet my conscience did not give me certainty, but I always doubted and said, “You didn’t do that right. You weren’t contrite enough. You left that out of your confession.�
�25

  In the past, the monastic life had encouraged a spirituality that was essentially communal. Monks had listened to the scriptures together during the liturgy. Lectio divina had been a ruminative, unanxious, and even enjoyable method of appropriating the truths of religion. But the new emphasis on the individual made Luther so obsessed with his own spiritual performance that he had become mired in the ego that he was supposed to transcend. None of the medieval rites and practices could touch what he called the tristitia (“sorrow”) that filled him with an acute terror of death and a conviction of abject impotence.26 In addition, he had expressed the yearning for absolute certainty that would also characterize religion in the modern period.

  Luther found salvation in the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Human beings could not save themselves by performing meritorious deeds and rituals; if we had faith, Christ would clothe us in his own righteousness. Our good deeds were, therefore, the result rather than the cause of God’s favor. This was not an original idea; it was already a perfectly respectable Catholic position.27 But while he was studying Paul’s letter to the Romans, it broke upon Luther with the overwhelming power of a new revelation when he came across the words: “The just man lives by faith.”28 They “made me feel as though I had been born again, and as though I had entered through the open gates of paradise itself,” he would recall later.29 The precise conclusion that Luther drew from this one sentence would probably have surprised Paul, but it spoke to the unconscious needs of a generation that found traditional practices empty and unproductive.30

  The profound societal changes of early modernity caused many to feel disoriented and lost. Living in medias res, they could not see the direction that their society was taking but experienced its slow transformation in isolated, incoherent ways. As the old mythology that had given structure and significance to their ancestors crumbled in this new situation, many seem to have experienced the sense of powerlessness that had afflicted Luther. Before their own conversions to fresh religious vision, Zwingli and Calvin had also experienced a paralyzing helplessness before the trials of human existence and were convinced that they could contribute nothing toward their own salvation. Consequently, all the reformers emphasized the unqualified divine sovereignty that would not only characterize the modern God but also help to shape the Scientific Revolution.31

  The emphasis on God’s absolute power meant that God alone could change the course of events, so human beings, who were essentially impotent, must rely on his unconditional might. When the young Zwingli had contracted the plague that wiped out 25 percent of the population of Zurich, he knew there was nothing he could do to save himself. “Do as you will for I lack nothing,” he prayed. “I am your vessel to be restored or destroyed.”32 The young Calvin had felt so in thrall to the institutional Church that he was both unwilling and unable to break free, and it had taken what seemed a divine initiative to shift him: “At last God turned my course in a different direction by the hidden bridle of his providence … by a sudden conversion to docility, he tamed a mind too stubborn for its years.”33

  When Luther spoke of the faith that could justify men and women he did not, of course, mean “belief” in our modern sense but an act of total trust in the absolute power of God. “Faith,” he explained in one of his sermons, “does not require information, knowledge and certainty, but a free surrender and joyful bet on his unfelt, untried and unknown goodness.”34 Luther had no time for the “false theologian,” who “looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things that have actually happened.”35 Far from giving a clear vision, faith brought “a sort of darkness that can see nothing.”36 Alienated from the natural theology of Scotus and Ockham, he did not imagine for one moment that the investigation of the cosmos or natural reasoning could bring us true knowledge of God. It was not only pointless but could even be dangerous to try to prove God’s existence, because too much speculation about God’s inconceivable might in governing the universe could cause human beings to fall into a state of abject despair and terror.37 But despite its religious motivation, this deliberate desacralization of the cosmos was a secularizing idea that would encourage scientists to approach the world independently of the divine.38

  Luther’s reliance on “scripture alone” would lead to a theology that was more dependent than hitherto on the word. The success of the reformers was due in large part to the invention of the printing press, which not only helped to propagate the new ideas but also changed people’s relationship to the text. The word would now replace the image and the icon in people’s thinking, and this would make theology more verbose.39 Ritual was also downgraded; ritual acts of piety designed, so the reformers assumed, to acquire merit, were at best futile and at worst blasphemous.40 Lutheran churches maintained many of the customary vestments, paintings, altarpieces, and ceremonies; organ music and hymns survived, and the German Reformation would inspire a new tradition of church music that would reach its apogee in the work of J. S. Bach (1685–1750). It would give a transcendent dimension to the often prosaic words of the vernacular. But in the Calvinist tradition, pictures and statues vanished, church music was ruthlessly simplified, and ceremony was abandoned in favor of extempore worship.

  Printing helped to secularize the relationship of the reader to the truth that he was trying to acquire.41 In the past, the Church had—to an extent—been able to supervise the flow of ideas and information, but the proliferation of books and pamphlets after the middle of the sixteenth century made this censorship far more difficult. As the printed book began to replace oral methods of communication, the information it provided was depersonalized and, perhaps, became more fixed and less flexible than in the old days, when truth had developed in dynamic relation between master and pupil. The printed page itself was an image of precision and exactitude, a symptom of the mental outlook of the early modern commercial ethos. Inventors, merchants, and scientists were discovering the importance of accuracy; their knowledge was oriented to this world and to concrete, practical results. Efficiency was becoming the watchword of modernity. It was no longer desirable to reach for nebulous truth: things had to work effectively on the ground. As people were forced to pit their wits against extraordinary challenges occurring simultaneously on so many different fronts, a more systematic and pragmatic approach to knowledge was becoming essential.

  This would inevitably affect the way people thought about religion. In premodern society, men and women had experienced the sacred in earthly objects, so that symbol and the sacred had been inseparable. The Eucharistic bread and wine had been identical with the transcendent reality to which they directed attention. Now the reformers declared that the Eucharist was “only” a symbol and the Mass no longer a symbolic reenactment of Calvary but a simple memorial. They were beginning to speak about the myths of religion as though they were logoi, and the alacrity with which people seized upon these new teachings suggests that many Christians in Europe were losing the older habits of thought.

  The theological quarrels between Rome and the reformers and, later, among the reformers themselves were giving more importance to the exact formulation of abstruse doctrines. The Protestant reformers and their Catholic opponents all used the printing press, council, and synod to draw ever finer dogmatic distinctions as they struggled to express their differences from one another. From the 1520s, the reformers started to issue “catechisms,” dialogues of stereotyped questions and answers, to ensure that their congregations accepted a particular interpretation of the creed. Correct faith was gradually becoming a matter of accepting the proper teachings. The Protestant reliance on “scripture alone” dispensed with the Catholic notion of “tradition” that saw each generation deepening its understanding of the sacred text in a cumulative “bricolage.” Instead of trying to get beyond language, Protestants would be encouraged to focus on the precise, original, and supposedly unchanging word of God in print. Instead of reading the sacred text in a communal setting, they
would wrestle with its obscurities on their own. Slowly, in tune with the new commercial and scientific spirit, a distinctively “modern” notion of religious truth as logical, unmediated, and objective was emerging in the Western Christian world.42

  As the Reformation proceeded, Protestantism began to morph into a bewildering number of sects, each with its own doctrinal bias, its own interpretation of the Bible, and each convinced that it alone had a monopoly on truth.43 There was now a clamor of religious opinion in Europe. When Luther had battled with the Catholic authorities, other intellectually minded clergy either did the same or took vociferous issue with his ideas. Preachers began to air their disagreements in public and urged the laity to join the debate. Zwingli argued that lay folk should feel empowered to question official dogma and should not need to wait on the decisions of a synod. “Calvinists” started to articulate doctrines to distinguish themselves from “Lutherans.” Inevitably, this orgy of acrimonious doctrinal debate would affect the traditional notion of “belief,” pushing intellectual orthodoxy to the fore.

  Catholics also found it necessary to reformulate their faith, but they maintained to a greater degree the older notion of religion as practice. The Spaniards, still in the vanguard of modernization, took the lead in the Catholic reformation initiated by the Council of Trent (1545–63), which made the Church a more centralized body on the model of the absolute monarchy. The Council reinforced the power of pope and hierarchy, issued a catechism to ensure doctrinal conformity, ensured that the clergy were educated to a higher standard, and rationalized liturgical and devotional practices, jettisoning those that were either corrupt or no longer effective. Trent set up programs of education and parish organization to ensure that the new intellectual style spread to the laity.44 But even though the Council fathers went to such lengths to enforce dogmatic orthodoxy, their prime concern was to promote regular liturgical observance to enable the laity to transform the old external, communal rites into genuinely interior devotion. Catholics were certainly drifting toward the new conception of “belief,” but they would never identify it so completely with doctrinal assent as Protestants.45