Section 3. the Liberal-Romantic Appreciation. (circa 1794-C. 1860)

At about the end of the eighteenth century historiography underwent a profound change due primarily to three influences: 1. The French Revolution and the struggle for political democracy throughout nearly a century after 1789; 2. The Romantic Movement; 3. The rise of the scientific spirit. The judgment of the Reformation changed accordingly; the rather unfavorable verdict of the eighteenth century was completely reversed. Hardly by its extremest partisans in the Protestant camp has the importance of that movement and the character of its leaders been esteemed so highly as it was by the writers of the liberal-romantic school. Indeed, so little had confession to do with this bias that the finest things about Luther and the most extravagant praise of his work, was uttered not by Protestants, but by the Catholic Doellinger, the Jew Heine, and the free thinkers, Michelet, Carlyle, and Froude.

The French Revolution taught men to see, or misled them into construing, the whole of history as a struggle for liberty against oppression. Naturally, the Reformation was one of the favorite examples of this perpetual warfare; it was the Revolution of the earlier age, and Luther was the great liberator, standing for the Rights of Man against a galling tyranny.

The first to draw the parallel between Reformation and Revolution was Condorcet in his noble essay on The Advance of the Human Spirit, written in prison and published posthumously. Luther, said he, punished the crimes of the clergy and freed some peoples from the yoke of the papacy; he would have freed all, save for the false politics of the kings who, feeling instinctively that religious liberty would bring political enfranchisement, banded together against the {714} revolt. He adds that the epoch brought added strength to the government and to political science and that it purified morals by abolishing sacerdotal celibacy; but that it was (like the Revolution, one reads between the lines) soiled by great atrocities.

In the year 1802, the Institute of France announced as the subject for a prize competition, "What has been the influence of the Reformation of Luther on the political situation of the several states of Europe and on the progress of enlightenment?" The prize was won by Charles de Villers [Sidenote: Villers] in an essay maintaining elaborately the thesis that the gradual improvement of the human species has been effected by a series of revolutions, partly silent, partly violent, and that the object of all these risings has been the attainment of either religious or of civil liberty. After arguing his position in respect to the Reformation, the author eulogizes it for having established religious freedom, promoted civil liberty, and for having endowed Europe with a variety of blessings, including almost everything he liked. Thus, in his opinion, the Reformation made Protestant countries more wealthy by keeping the papal tax-gatherers aloof; it started "that grand idea the balance of power," and it prepared the way for a general philosophical enlightenment.

The thesis of Villers is exactly that maintained, with more learning and caution, by Guizot. According to him:

The Reformation was a vast effort made by the human race to secure its freedom; it was a new-born desire to think and judge freely and independently of all ideas and opinions, which until then Europe had received or been bound to receive from the hands of antiquity. It was a great endeavor to emancipate the human reason and to call things by their right names. It was an insurrection of the human mind against the absolute power of the spiritual estate.

{715} [Sidenote: Romantic Movement]

But there was more than politics to draw the sympathies of the nineteenth century to the sixteenth. A large anthology of poetical, artistic and musical tributes to Luther and the Reformation might be made to show how congenial they were to the spirit of that time. One need only mention Werner's drama on the subject of Luther's life (1805), Mendelssohn's "Reformation Symphony" (1832-3), Meyerbeer's opera "The Huguenots" (1836), and Kaulbach's painting "The Age of the Reformation" (c. 1810). In fact the Reformation was a Romantic movement, with its emotional and mystical piety, its endeavor to transcend the limits of the classic spirit, to search for the infinite, to scorn the trammels of traditional order and method.

All this is reflected in Mme. de Stael's enthusiastic appreciation of Protestant Germany, in which she found a people characterized by reflectiveness, idealism, and energy of inner conviction. She contrasted Luther's revolution of ideas with her own countrymen's revolution of acts, practical if not materialistic. The German had brought back religion from an affair of politics to be a matter of life; had transferred it from the realm of calculated interest to that of heart and brain.

Much the same ideas, set forth with the most dazzling brilliancy of style, animate Heine's too much neglected sketch of German religion and philosophy. To a French public, unappreciative of German literature, Heine points out that the place taken in France by belles lettres is taken east of the Rhine by metaphysics. From Luther to Kant there is one continuous development of thought, and no less than two revolutions in spiritual values. Luther was the sword and tongue of his time; the tempest that shattered the old oaks of hoary tyranny; his hymn was the Marseillaise of the spirit; he made a revolution and not with {716} rose-leaves, either, but with a certain, "divine brutality." He gave his people language, Kant gave them thought; Luther deposed the pope; Robespierre decapitated the king; Kant disposed of God: it was all one insurrection of Man against the same tyrant under different names.

Under the triple influence of liberalism, romanticism and the scientific impulse presently to be described, most of the great historians of the middle nineteenth century wrote. If not the greatest, yet the most lovable of them all, was Jules Michelet, [Sidenote: Michelet] a free-thinker of Huguenot ancestry. His History of France is like the biography of some loved and worshipped genius; he agonizes in her trials, he glories in her triumphs. And to all great men, her own and others, he puts but one inexorable question, "What did you do for the people?" and according to their answer they stand or fall before him. It is just here that one notices (what entirely escaped previous generations), that the "people" here means that part of it now called, in current cant, "the bourgeoisie," that educated middle class with some small property and with the vote. For the ignorant laborer and the pauper Michelet had as little concern as he had small patience with king and noble and priest. One thing that he and his contemporaries prized in Luther was just that bourgeois virtue that made him a model husband and father, faithfully performing a daily task for an adequate reward. Luther's joys, he assures us, were "those of the heart, of the man, the innocent happiness of family and home. What family more holy, what home more pure?" But he returns ever and again to the thought that the Huguenots were the republicans of their age and that, "Luther has been the restorer of liberty. If now we exercise in all its fullness this highest prerogative of human intelligence, it is to him we are indebted for it. {717} To whom do I owe the power of publishing what I am now writing, save to this liberator of modern thought?" Michelet employed his almost matchless rhetoric not only to exalt the Reformers to the highest pinnacle of greatness, but to blacken the character of their adversaries, the obscurantists, the Jesuits, Catherine de' Medici.

English liberalism found its perfect expression in the work of Froude. Built up on painstaking research, readable as a novel, cut exactly to the prejudices of the English Protestant middle class, The History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada won a resounding immediate success. Froude loved Protestantism for the enemies it made, and as a mild kind of rationalism. The Reformers, he thought, triumphed because they were armed with the truth; it was a revolt of conscience against lies, a real religion over against "a superstition which was but the counterpart of magic and witchcraft" and which, at that time, "meant the stake, the rack, the gibbet, the Inquisition dungeons and the devil enthroned." It was the different choice made then by England and Spain that accounted for the greatness of the former and the downfall of the latter, for, after the Spaniard, once "the noblest, grandest and most enlightened people in the known world," had chosen for the saints and the Inquisition, "his intellect shrivelled in his brain and the sinews shrank in his self-bandaged limbs."

Practically the same type of opinion is found in the whole school of middle-century historians. "Our firm belief is," wrote Macaulay, "that the North owes its great civilization and prosperity chiefly to the moral effect of the Protestant Reformation, and that the decay of the Southern countries is to be mainly ascribed to the great Catholic revival." It would be pleasant, {718} were there space, to quote similar enthusiastic appreciations from the French scholars Quinet and Thierry, the Englishman Herbert Spencer and the Americans Motley and Prescott. They all regarded the Reformation as at once an enlightenment and enfranchisement. Even the philosophers rushed into the same camp. Carlyle worshipped Luther as a hero; Emerson said that his "religious movement was the foundation of so much intellectual life in Europe; that is, Luther's conscience animating sympathetically the conscience of millions, the pulse passed into thought, and ultimated itself in Galileos, Keplers, Swedenborgs, Newtons, Shakespeares, Bacons and Miltons." Back of all this appreciation was a strong unconscious sympathy between the age of the Reformation and that of Victoria. The creations of the one, Protestantism, the national state, capitalism, individualism, reached their perfect maturity in the other. The very moderate liberals of the latter found in the former just that "safe and sane" spirit of reform which they could thoroughly approve.

The enthusiasm generated by political democracy in France, England and America, was supplemented in Germany by patriotism. Herder first emphasized Luther's love of country as his great virtue; Arndt, in the Napoleonic wars, counted it unto him for righteousness that he hated Italian craft and dreaded French deceitfulness. Fichte, at the same time, in his fervent Speeches to the German Nation, called the Reformation "the consummate achievement of the German people," and its "perfect act of world-wide significance." Freytag, at a later period, tried to educate the public to search for a German state at once national and liberal. In his Pictures from the German Past, largely painted from sixteenth-century models, he places all the high-lights on "Deutschtum" and "Buergertum," {719} and all the shade on the foreigners and the Junkers. With Freytag as a German liberal may be classed D. F. Strauss, who defended the Reformers for choosing, rather than superficial culture, "the better part," "the one thing needful," which was truth.

It is now high time to say something of the third great influence that, early in the nineteenth century, transformed historiography. It was the rise of the scientific spirit, of the fruitful conception of a world lapped in universal law. For two centuries men had gradually become accustomed to the thought of an external nature governed by an unbreakable chain of cause and effect, but it was still believed that man, with his free will, was an exception and that history, therefore, consisting of the sum total of humanity's arbitrary actions, was incalculable and in large part inexplicable. But the more closely men studied the past, and the more widely and deeply did the uniformity of nature soak into their consciousness, the more "natural" did the progress of the human race seem. When it was found that every age had its own temper and point of view, that men turned with one accord in the same direction as if set by a current, long before any great man had come to create the current, the influence of personality seemed to sink into the background, and that of other influences to be preponderant.

Quite inevitably the first natural and important philosophy of history took a semi-theological, semi-personal form. The philosopher Hegel, pondering on the fact that each age has its own unmistakable "time-spirit" and that each age is a natural, even logical, development of some antecedent, announced the Doctrine of Ideas as the governing forces in human progress. History was but the development of spirit, or the realization of its idea; and its fundamental law was the necessary "progress in the consciousness of freedom." The {720} Oriental knew that one is free, the Greek that some are free, the Germans that all are free. In this third, or Teutonic, stage of evolution, the Reformation was one of the longest steps. The characteristic of modern times is that the spirit is conscious of its own freedom and wills the true, the eternal and the universal. The dawn of this period, after the long and terrible night of the Middle Ages, is the Renaissance, its sunrise the Reformation. In order to prove his thesis, Hegel labors to show that the cause of the Protestant revolt in the corruption of the church was not accidental but necessary, inasmuch as, at the Catholic stage of progress, that which is adored must necessarily be sensuous, but at the lofty German level the worshipper must look for God in the spirit and heart, that is, in faith. The subjectivism of Luther is due to German sincerity manifesting the self-consciousness of the world-spirit; his doctrine of the eucharist, conservative as it seems to the rationalist, is in reality a manifestation of the same spirituality, in the assertion of an immediate relation of Christ to the soul. In short, the essence of the Reformation is said to be that man in his very nature is destined to be free, and all history since Luther's time is but a working out of the implications of his position. If only the Germanic nations have adopted Protestantism, it is because only they have reached the highest state of spiritual development.

The philosopher's truest disciple was Ferdinand Christian Baur, of whom it has been said that he rather deduced history than narrated it. With much detail he filled in the outline offered by the master, in as far as the subject of church history was concerned. He showed that the Reformation (a term to which he objected, apparently preferring Division, or Schism) was bound to come from antecedents already in full operation before Luther. At most, he admitted, the {721} personal factor was decisive of the time and place of the inevitable revolution, but said that the most powerful personality would have been helpless but for the popularity of the ideas expressed by him. Like Hegel, he deduced the causes of the movement from the corruption of the medieval church, and like him he regarded all later history as but the tide of which the first wave broke in 1517. The true principle of the movement, religious autonomy and subjective freedom, he believed, had been achieved only for states in the sixteenth century, but thereafter logically and necessarily came to be applied to individuals.

From the Hegelian school came forth the best equipped historian the world has ever seen. Save the highest quality of thought and emotion that is the prerogative of poetic genius, Leopold von Ranke lacked nothing of industry, of learning, of method and of talent to make him the perfect narrator of the past. It was his idea to pursue history for no purpose but its own; to tell "exactly what happened" without regard to the moral, or theological, or political lesson. Thinking the most colorless presentation the best, he seldom allowed his own opinions to appear. In treating the Reformation he was "first an historian and then a Christian." There is in his work little biography, and that little psychological; there is no dogma and no polemic. From Hegel he derived his belief in the "spirit" of the times, and nicely differentiated that of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Counter-reformation. He was the first to generalize the use of the word "Counter-reformation"--coined in 1770 and obtaining currency later on the analogy of "counter-revolution." The causes of the Reformation Ranke found in "deeper religious and moral repugnance to the disorders of a merely assenting faith and service of 'works,' and, secondarily, in the assertion of the {722} rights and duties residing in the state." Quite rightly, he emphasized the result of the movement in breaking down the political power of the ecclesiastical state, and establishing in its stead "a completely autonomous state sovereignty, bound by no extraneous considerations and existing for itself alone." Of all the ideas which have aided in the development of modern Europe he esteemed this the most effective. Would he have thought so after 1919?

A new start in the search for fixed historical laws was made by Henry Thomas Buckle. His point of departure was not, like that of Hegel, the universal, but rather certain very particular sociological facts as interpreted by Comte's positivism. Because the same percentage of unaddressed letters is mailed every year, because crimes vary in a constant curve according to season, because the number of suicides and of marriages stands in a fixed ratio to the cost of bread, Buckle argued that all human acts, at least in the mass, must be calculable, and reducible to general laws. At present we are concerned only with his views on the Reformation. The religious opinions prevalent at any period, he pointed out, are but symptoms of the general culture of that age. Protestantism was to Catholicism simply as the moderate enlightenment of the sixteenth century was to the darkness of the earlier centuries. Credulity and ignorance were still common, though diminishing, in Luther's time, and this intellectual change was the cause of the religious change. Buckle makes one strange and damaging admission, namely that though, according to his theory, or, as he puts it, "according to the natural order," the "most civilized countries should be Protestant and the most uncivilized Catholic ," it has not always been so. In general Buckle adopts the theory of the Reformation {723} as an uprising of the human mind, an enlightenment, and a democratic rebellion.

Whereas Henry Hallam, who wrote on the relation of the Reformers to modern thought, is a belated eighteenth-century rationalist, doubtless Lecky is best classified as a member of the new school. His History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism is partly Hegelian, partly inspired by Buckle. His main object is to show how little reason has to do with the adoption or rejection of any theology, and how much it is dependent on a certain spirit of the age, determined by quite other causes. He found the essence of the Reformation in its conformity to then prevalent habits of mind and morals. But he thought it had done more than any other movement to emancipate the mind from superstition and to secularize society.

It is impossible to do more than mention by name, in the short space at my command, the principal Protestant apologists for the Reformation, in this period. Whereas Ritschl gave a somewhat new aspect to the old "truths," Merle d'Aubigne won an enormous and unmerited success by reviving the supernatural theory of the Protestant revolution, with such modern connotations and modifications as suited the still lively prejudices of the evangelical public of England and America; for it was in these countries that his book, in translation from the French, won its enormous circulation.

An extremely able adverse judgment of the Reformation was expressed by the Catholic Doellinger, the most theological of historians, the most historically-minded of divines. He, too, thought Luther had really {724} founded a new religion, of which the center was the mystical doctrine, tending to solipsism, of justification by faith. The very fact that he said much good of Luther, and approved of many of his practical reforms, made his protest the more effective. It is noticeable that when he broke with Rome he did not become a Protestant.

The preface of the English edition of 1848 claims that whereas, since 1835, only 4000 copies were sold in France, between 150,000 and 200,000 were sold in England and America.