The Undivided Past (7 page)

This in turn meant that many
God-fearing Europeans came to view what had once been their shared confessional world according to a grotesque earthly interpretation of the
Manichean division between the (saved) sheep and the (damned) goats that Christ had outlined in
Matthew’s Gospel.
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For during these continental “wars of religion,” the battle between good and evil, or between truth and falsehood, or between the light and darkness, or
between
the forces of Christ and those of the devil was no longer between Christians and those believers in other deities or in none; instead the conflict was
among
those who subscribed to one version of Christianity and those who subscribed to another. From this perspective, “heretics,” whose beliefs were by definition perverted and debased, and who espoused an erroneous
interpretation of the Gospels, were much more reprehensible than “infidels,” who did not recognize the Gospels at all.
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In such a confrontation between those who differed about how to worship the very same God, there appeared to be no scope for compromise or conversation or coexistence. As (the Protestant) King
Gustavus Adolphus of
Sweden put it in an unyielding letter to his brother-in-law, the elector of Brandenburg, written in 1630, at a crucial stage in the Thirty Years War, “I don’t want to hear about neutrality. His grace must be my friend or foe.… This is a fight between God and the Devil. If his grace is with God, he must join me, if he is for the Devil, he must fight me. There is no third way.”
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These belligerent remarks were not unusual, and they help explain why the Reformation era came to be regarded as one of irreconcilable creedal extremism and confessional polarization. For in such a world of opinion and belief, the very idea of
toleration seemed tantamount to condoning
theological error, and the slope leading from doctrinal disagreements down through judicial
persecution to full-scale war between Catholic and Protestant communities would prove both slippery and seductive. The biblical injunction “he that is not with me is against me” now became a clarion call—for princes and armies to confront each other on battlefields across Europe; for popes to excommunicate wayward rulers and their erring subjects; for assassins to murder sovereigns in the name of the one true religion; for scholars and theologians and polemicists to scorn, mock, deride, and denounce their opponents; for lynch mobs and bloodbaths such as the “massacre” of French Protestants on St. Bartholomew’s Day 1572; and for individuals to be imprisoned, tortured, and burned at the stake for having accepted (and refusing to renounce) the “wrong” version of the
Christian faith. As the historian Sir Keith
Thomas has observed, with an eye also turned to the confrontations of our own day, the Reformation’s rupture of
Christianity “offers a salutary warning of the tragic consequences which follow when the world is envisaged as a cosmic battleground on which opposing forces of good and evil contend for supremacy.”
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Many of Europe’s rulers and priests, generals and polemicists fanned the flames in the manner of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, habitually saluting their supporters and denouncing their opponents in stark, adversarial terms, and their intransigent utterances, irreconcilable attitudes, and belligerent deeds informed the no less partisan narrative histories of both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, the earliest of them produced in the midst of the very events they sought to chronicle.
⁹⁷
Hence, on the one hand, the lengthy tradition of anti-Catholic writers, beginning with such figures as
Johannes Pappus and Lucas
Osiander the Elder in
Germany, who sought to establish precedents in the early church for later Protestant practices—a tradition eventually encompassing such authors as
W. E. H. Lecky,
Lord Macaulay, and
John Lothrop Motley, who traced and celebrated “the rise of toleration,” a barely disguised proxy for “the rise of Protestantism” and its triumph over the iniquities of “popery”—and on the other, an equally august lineage of Catholic historians from
Cesare Baronio to
Hilaire Belloc acclaiming the survival and revival of the one true church and denouncing schismatic and heretical Protestant “reformers” from
Martin Luther onward. In the pages of these competing confessional histories, the battles of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation would continue to be fought again and again across subsequent centuries, thereby reasserting, reaffirming, and reinforcing these long-standing adversarial religious identities.
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Yet while it may be true that “on every level, from the local to the international, co-religionists felt an impulse to make common cause with one another,” this picture of entrenched religious communities at war was by no means universally valid, even in the undeniably polarized Europe of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
⁹⁹
As with the former divide between “paganism” and “Christianity,” or with the continuing confrontations between “Christianity” and “
Islam,” neither the “Catholic” nor the “Protestant” side was as united, coherent, or monolithic as their prelates and princes repeatedly claimed at the time, and as partisan historians have regularly described since. By the end of the sixteenth century, Protestantism was no longer a single oppositional creed, in thrall to the commanding personality of Martin Luther, but had split and subdivided into many local and national variants:
Calvinist in Geneva,
Lutheran in North Germany
and Scandinavia,
Reformed in the
Netherlands,
Anglican in England, and Presbyterian in
Scotland. There were also many deep divergences and disagreements among Roman Catholics, about reform, about doctrine, and about relations with the Protestant churches, which were lengthily (and sometimes acrimoniously) displayed and debated at the many meetings of the
Council of Trent held between 1545 and 1563. Moreover, by the end of the sixteenth century virtually every European kingdom and principality was home to significant religious minorities, with the result that in many parts of the countryside, and in most major cities, from Paris to Augsburg, Basel to Amsterdam, Cologne to Vienna, Protestants and Catholics of whatever particular persuasion often lived close together and sometimes side by side, in intricate and irregular patterns that were impossible to map or control.
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With the practical boundaries of collective religious identity far from clear or agreed, it is scarcely surprising that conversations did take place across them, in some instances sponsored and supported by religious and political leaders. During the half century after Martin Luther’s initial protests, there remained hopes that the recent religious divide might be temporary, with some prelates and scholars making determined efforts to bridge the emerging doctrinal gaps and to promote engaged dialogue and negotiation. Such figures included the Italian cardinal
Gasparo Contarini, Archbishop
Hermann von Wied of Cologne, and
Charles de Guise, the cardinal of Lorraine, on the Catholic side, and
Martin Bucer and
Philipp Melanchthon, both of them renowned Protestant scholars.
¹⁰¹
The most significant of such gatherings, known as the Colloquy of Poissy, was held in 1561 in a small town on the Seine north of Paris. It was summoned by the French queen regent,
Catherine de’ Medici, on behalf of her young son,
King Charles IX, and by the cardinal of Lorraine, with both Protestants and Catholics invited in an attempt to accomplish a general reunion of the churches. Here, and at the Colloquy of Nantes held in the following year, were serious people engaged in serious conversations, and making serious attempts to avert a permanent split in western Christendom, by seeking a “third way” of conciliation and accommodation rather than proclaiming and entrenching a
Manichean division between Catholics and Protestants.
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There were also some lay writers who tried to outline a middle position between the ostensibly irreconcilable “confessional totalities” of Catholicism and Protestantism.
¹⁰³
One such figure was the poet and philologist
Sebastian Castellio, who in 1554 published a work entitled
Concerning Heretics: Whether They Are to Be Persecuted and How They Are to Be Treated
in response to the execution of a Spanish physician named
Michael Servetus. Heretics, he insisted, should never be executed, by Catholics or Protestants, and certainly not (as in this case) at the behest of
John Calvin.
¹⁰⁴
Another such writer was
Jean Bodin, who in
The Six Books of the Republic
, published in 1576, expounded the “
political” and “prudential” case for religious moderation. Public disputes about faith, he urged, brought all matters concerning belief into disrepute, and if they took on a belligerent character, they might bring ruin to the state. Accordingly, Bodin argued that where a new branch of the
Christian faith found firm support in society at large, it was a matter of common sense for the authorities to tolerate it rather than persecute it. Over a decade later, he returned to these subjects in
The Sevenfold Colloquium
, a sequence of six dialogues among seven wise men, each representing a different point of view:
Lutheran,
Calvinist, Catholic,
Jew,
Arab, Skeptic, and Natural Rationalist. At the close, they part, never to converse on such subjects again. Their harmonious discourse on religious differences was over, and the reader is left to decide whether this transfaith conversation was a dead end—or perhaps the promise of a way forward.
¹⁰⁵

With cogent arguments for religious moderation and dialogue being made, even as divisions were hardening and intensifying elsewhere on the continent, some European rulers sought to promote accommodation and conversation between Catholics and Protestants. Hence in Transylvania the Declaration of
Torda, passed by the Diet in 1568, which set down that ministers should everywhere be free to preach and proclaim the Gospel “according to their understanding of it,” and that “no one is permitted to threaten to imprison or banish anyone because of their teaching, because faith is a gift from God.” Likewise, in
Poland-Lithuania, the nobility approved the
Confederation of Warsaw of 1573, in which it was agreed that “we who differ with regard to religion
will keep the peace with one another, and will not for a different faith or change of churches shed blood nor punish one another by confiscation of property, infamy, imprisonment or banishment.”
¹⁰⁶
Similarly, in
France, the
Edict of Nantes, promulgated by King
Henri IV in 1598, established the sort of religious compromise that successive monarchs had been seeking since the time of the Colloquy of Poissy, allowing freedom of worship in perpetuity for Catholic and Protestants alike, in return for acknowledgments of loyalty to the crown. Thus did France reject the
Manichean divisions that had previously damaged and disfigured it during its
Wars of Religion, and for most of the seventeenth century it stood, alongside Transylvania and Poland-Lithuania, for compromise and toleration in matters of belief.
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Although often regarded as the ultimate European conflict over faith and God, the
Thirty Years War was a further indication that monolithic religious identities, and their attendant antagonisms and confrontations, were in practice increasingly difficult to justify or sustain. In his conduct of French foreign policy, Cardinal
Richelieu held the view that “the interests of a state and the interests of religion are two entirely different things.” He thus not only respected the provisions of the Edict of Nantes, but even entered into an alliance with Protestant powers in his country’s battles against the Catholic
Habsburgs.
¹⁰⁸
Likewise,
Pope Urban VIII, who was Richelieu’s contemporary, was no friend of Catholic
Spain or the Spanish Habsburgs, and on occasion he even gave thanks for the victories of Protestant “heretics.” In the same way, the Protestant prince
Gábor Bethlen of Transylvania was prepared to negotiate with the Catholic
Holy Roman emperor, with a view to gaining territories in
Hungary. Differences of religion were thus no impediment to cooperation, and confessional commonality was no guarantee of collaboration: no Protestant rulers came to the aid of their coreligionist, the king of Bohemia, when his lands were invaded by a Catholic army at the behest of the Holy Roman emperor.
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Among Catholic and Protestant rulers alike, practicality and considerations of statecraft increasingly won out over religious commitment, as was made plain in the Peace of
Westphalia, which brought the Thirty Years War to an end. According to the principle of
cuius regio, cuius religio
, each
ruler would have the right to determine the religion of his own state, but
Christians living in principalities where their denomination was not the established church were also guaranteed the right to practice their faith in public during allotted hours and in private at their will.
¹¹⁰

Notwithstanding the powerful urgings of conciliatory writers such as
Castellio and
Bodin, and the contrary examples of Transylvania,
Poland-Lithuania, and
France, it took most rulers of early modern Europe a long time to learn the simple lesson that wars waged against fellow Christians were decidedly ill-advised. But away from the theological disputations and the body-strewn battlefields, many of their humble subjects, who were also confronted with the challenges of living, coping, and surviving in an era of unprecedented religious turmoil and animosity, had already reached these more measured conclusions. For in the wake of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, as historian
Benjamin J. Kaplan notes, “millions of Europeans” were compelled to struggle with an elemental question: “can people whose basic beliefs are irreconcilably opposed live together peacefully?” “More often than usually recognized,” the author concludes, “the answer in that earlier era was yes.” Despite so much evidence to the contrary, many “viable alternatives to bloodshed” were developed and practiced, which proved both compelling and appealing. Unlike many of their temporal and spiritual superiors, the ordinary men and women of Europe “did not have to love each other in order not to kill each other,” and even in the darkest periods of religious persecution and interfaith conflict, they worked out many successful “arrangements for peaceful co-existence.”
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