It is an amusing irony that my conversion to Catholicism was aided primarily by my study of the various heretics. I choose as one my second semester topics a module called 'Martin Luther and the German Nation'. It was to be a close examination of the man in the context of his country. Generally however, it was focused on Luther. I remember sitting through my first lecture, I had followed, generally, the lines of argument that were being put forward, we were discussing the 95 theses I think, but as a whole most of the discussion went over my head. Not only did I not really know what Luther was saying, but I had no idea why he was saying it. I thought to myself, 'I need to know what he is attacking, before I can begin to understand his attack'. The rest shall we say was history.I resolved to look at what Catholicism actually was, I hoped that by doing so I could understand what it was that Luther was saying. I related as much to a Catholic friend of mine, saying in a miserable sort of way: 'I don't understand half of what Luther is saying, I think I need to understand Rome', to which the reply was rather sarcastically, 'Oh dear!'. Of course meaning that it was no bad thing that I had to understand Rome.
I set about this task in a most sporadic way and if anyone undergoes such a task it is advisable to stay away from the Internet. The Reformation is still a polemical topic, especially among more radical Protestants. I remember coming across websites such as 'Jesus-is-lord' and Jack Chick publications. Here one can find some of the most hideous bigotry and vile hate that ever could be issued forth. It did not fill me with confidence in Protestantism to see so many irrational, ahistorical, lies being spread. One can find sheer nonsense, like 'The King James Bible 1611 version are the only inspired Scriptures, all others are corrupted by Rome', and 'Rome has being persecuting "True Christians" the Baptists from 300 AD through to the present day, millions of martyrs', or 'Rome has got the names of every Protestant in the world one a super-computer in the Vatican so they can hunt us down with a new Grand-Inquisition, servicing the New World Order', and so on ad infinitum.
To say the least this did not much impress me, but I thought that there were always bound to be a few odd balls around surely Dr. Martin can offer some sanity. However, such was not the case, after all I wondered how prudent was it to give this advice:
If you are a preacher of mercy, do not preach an imaginary but the true mercy. If the mercy is true, you must therefore bear the true, not an imaginary sin. God does not save those who are only imaginary sinners. Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong, but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world. We will commit sins while we are here, for this life is not a place where justice resides. We, however, says Peter (2. Peter 3:13) are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth where justice will reign. It suffices that through God's glory we have recognized the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world. No sin can separate us from Him, even if we were to kill or commit adultery thousands of times each day. Do you think such an exalted Lamb paid merely a small price with a meager sacrifice for our sins? Pray hard for you are quite a sinner.
Men are weak, we have fallen natures and even after baptismal regeneration we bare the mark of a weakened nature. Apart from the falsity of the previous statement how much more appealling could it be to those whose inclination it is to sin (that is all humanity, including the saints, with the exclusion of Our Lady). What presumption could lead men into such madness! We may be looking forward to a day when we shall be perfected in Christ, where we cannot will that which should not be willed and it is true that we don't have it now, nonetheless at what point did sinning become acceptable. Nowhere in Gospel does Our Lord say, 'Just believe in Me and everything will be alright'. He says Faith heals, 'Your sins are forgiven you', 'Thy Faith has made thee whole', but at what point does he say, with Faith there is not such thing as Sin or that there is no consequence for sin!. This was just a minor point, but it brings forward an important point, the Fallacy of Justification by Faith Alone.
There are many very excellent refutations of this horrid and fetid argument, but I think one of the most powerful is simply the fact that the word 'alone' does not appear anywhere in the context of the Letter's of Saint Paul with the word 'Faith'. Furthermore, St Paul tells us that we need Faith, Hope and Charity, and the greatest of these is Charity. Faith, to me always seems to be the necessary precursor to living in Christ. That is not to say that all the theological virtues are not necessary, but it would be hypocrisy to act as if one believed, or had Faith while one didn't. Which is precisely what St. Paul warns against and condemns so vigorously.
The second point about Luther's doctrine is the rejection of Church authority based upon the abuses committed by the Papacy. Luther however, encounters a problem, if the Church is no longer the Church, 1) how do we know what Our Lord's Will is and 2) by what authority do we ensure that we understand Our Lord's Will. It leads then to the second and equally horrid argument of By Scripture Alone. This is even more absurd than by Faith alone, for whereas St. Paul does speak very often of the primal importance of Faith in his Letters, nowhere does anyone speak of the only source of knowledge or authority being invested in the Scriptures. How would we know what the Scriptures were, when they do not attest it themselves, without some authority to decree it? What about all the Christians in the first days of the Church, who had no Gospels nor Letters? In other words, how would we know which books from antiquity to trust and which to reject? What about the many and various interpretations that one can inject into the Scriptures? I can say that the Holy Ghost has guided me, but what about all the other various people who say the Holy Ghost has guided them? There can be no satisfactory answer to any of these questions. A Protestant must say that his man made doctrines regarding Christianity are true, simply and absolutely, in which case he is simply saying he is the Pope, or he must say that there are a set of 'core belief's' that if one subscribes to them one will be saved, everything else is just extraneous and unnecessary. Both teachings are contrary to the Scriptures.
Very early on I realised the consequences of the doctrines of Sola Fide and Sola Scriptura, they were logically untenable and were entirely suited to a particular time and place. They were essentially like any heresy, exaggerations of Catholic Truth's which suited their practitioners and appealing to weakened human nature.
One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, this formula came from the earliest ecumenical council of the Church. Some Protestants take upon themselves to reject the Credo, conveniently enough, but a majority agree that it is basically good. What is remarkable about is that none of the Protestant communities come close to fulfilling this part of it. Protestantism at least lacks that Universality which Rome possessed not only cross-culturally over the world, but through ages on ages. It certainly lacked Holiness, Luther was hardly a model Saint, an perverted king's political and adulterous expedience is hardly model statesmanship and so on. It also lacked Unity, once the Protestants were 'freed' from Rome they battled endlessly about what was 'true', 'pure', and 'primitive' Christianity. Each group of Protestants had their own little ideas concerning the various aspects of Christianity. Just one example being the various doctrines relating the the Holy Eucharist; Consubstantiation, Transmutation, Symbolism, Memorial and any other way of describing the Holy Sacrament; anything will do so long as it rejects Rome. Schism's appeared all over the 'Protestant Communion', and strangely enough 'unity' was no longer important, only 'True Believers' mattered. As for Apostolic only the Anglican Communion could say that it had retained Bishops and yet it had departed from Apostolic Christianity with its denial of the Papacy.
On a less doctrinal note however, my bigger concern with Protestantism was its provincial nature; that is both spatially and temporally. Protestantism appeared only in the Northern parts of Europe, and in France, and in these cases was essentially the whim of a Prince who had some political axe to grind with the Papacy or the Holy Roman Empire. Aside from that, why was it in the 16th Century that God decided to 'Reform' that Church in the manner of a revolution. God, Our Lord, had promised to be with the Church until the Consummation of the world, indeed he was the Bridegroom, yet he had left it to the 'anti-Christ' to reign for 1300 years before 'enlightening' a mad monk, an adulterous king, and a cruel Manichean of the 'True Gospel'. There was another problem with historic Protestantism. It is undeniable that modern secular humanism has its spiritual roots in Protestantism. That is not to say that those who were first engaged in 'reform' were aiming for the secularization of culture, but that the man centred religion of action that characterises Protestantism certainly left open the possibility of liberalism. Christopher Dawson most perfectly describes this as follows:
The civilization of medieval Christendom was essentially dependent on the ecclesiastical organization of Europe as an international or rather supernational unity. It was irreconcilable with the conception of a number of completely sovereign societies such as the national states of modern Europe. The medieval state was a congeries of semi-independent principalities and corporations, each of which enjoyed many of the attributes of sovereignty, while all of them together formed part of a wider society - the Christian people… The medieval unity was torn in sunder by a centrifugal movement, which made itself felt alike in culture, in religion, and in political and ecclesiastical organization.
In the South this movement took the form of a return to the older tradition of culture. The Renaissance in Italy was not a mere revival of scholarly interests in a dead past, as was usually the case in the northern countries. It was a true national awakening…
In Northern Europe it is obvious that the movement of national awakening had to find a different form of expression, since there was no older tradition of higher culture, and behind the medieval period there lay an age of pagan barbarism. Consequently Northern Europe could only assert its cultural independence by a remoulding and transforming of the Christian tradition itself in accordance with its national genius. The Renaissance of Northern Europe is the Reformation.
…, in the Reformation, we may see a Nordic revolt against the Latin traditions of the medieval culture. The syncretism of Roman and Germanic elements which had been achieved by the Carolingian age, was terminated by a violent explosion which separated the medieval culture complex into its component elements, and reorganized them on new lines. Thus the Reformation is the parallel and complement of the Renaissance as the one made the culture of Southern Europe more purely Latin, so the other made the culture of Northern Europe more purely Teutonic.
Hence it is no mere coincidence that the line of religious division after the Reformation follows so closely that if the old imperial frontier… Finally Calvinism, which is the form of Protestantism that appeals most strongly to the Latin mind, has an irregular distribution along the frontier line itself… [it is] well represented in the two Western kingdoms - England and France. The former was mainly Calvinist, with considerable Catholic, and Catholicizing elements. The latter was Catholic with a strong Calvinist minority and a Calvinizing influence represented by the Jansenists. But in each case the dominate religion is strongly national. In England the Church is
Protestant, but above all Anglican; in France it is Catholic, but also Gallican.
It is true that the Reformation, like the Christological heresies of the 5th century, originated as a religious and theological movement, but its historical importance is due less to its religious doctrine that to the social forces that it came to represent. Luther himself, the religious leader of the movement, is intellectually a man of the Middle Ages rather than of the modern world. His ideas were, in the main, those of the men of the 14th century, Ockham and Wycliffe and Hus. He was entirely alien in spirit from the culture of the Italian Renaissance, and even from the Northern humanists, like More and Erasmus, whom he describes as “the vilest miscreant that ever disgraced the earth”. His originality is due not to his intellectual position, but to the force of his emotional life. He embodies the revolt of the awakening German national spirit against every influence that was felt to be foreign or repressive; against asceticism and all that checked the free expression of the natural instincts, against the whole Latin tradition, above all against the Roman curia and its Italian officials which were to him the representatives of Antichrist and the arch-enemies of the German soul. “The Lutheran Reformation,” wrote Nietzsche, “in all its length and breadth was the indignation of the simple against something complicated.” It was “a spiritual Peasant Revolt”.
Consequently Luther’s religious work of reformation and simplification amounted to a de-intellectualization of the Catholic tradition. He eliminated the philosophical and Hellenic elements, and accentuated everything that was Semitic and non-intellectual. He took St. Paul without his Hellenism, and St. Augustine without his Platonism.
…it produced an accentuation of the purely occidental elements in Christianity. Faith was no longer a human participation in the Divine knowledge, but a purely non-rational experience- the conviction of personal salvation.
The Divine was no longer conceived as pure intelligence-…- the principle of intelligibility of the created universe. It was regarded as a despotic power whose decrees predestined man to eternal misery or eternal bliss by the mere fait of arbitrary will. It may seem that this denial of the possibility of human merit, and the insistence on the doctrine of predestination would lead to moral apathy and fatalism. This, however, was not the case. Protestantism was essentially a religion of action. By its hostility to monasticism and asceticism, it destroyed the contemplative ideal and substituted the standard of practical moral duty. And it is this new attitude to secular life-…-that Ritschl and so many other modern Protestants regard as the greatest and most characteristic achievement of the whole movement“. (Christopher Dawson, Religion and Progress, (London, 1945), pp. 177-181)
This rather long extract from Dawson's book summarises for me the historical problem of Protestantism, or at least demonstrates an area of weakness. Protestantism created the religion of progress because it divorced man from the Divine. It made his actions on earth somehow separate from his spiritual life. 'Believe and you will be saved', but for the time being make the most of life, Action not contemplation. It also shows how Protestantism could only be effective in certain places, certain cultural conditions. When those traditions were lost, then all the Protestantism offered was a private choice, separate from any public culture of religion. It was also Protestantism that fermented that most peculiar of all modern ideas; the separation of Faith from Reason. As though the intellect and the will were somehow so separate that one could not influence and effect the other. As if that which one puts Faith into is not that which appeals to the Reason, the intellect. With Protestantism there is no room for rational thought, merely emotions. Hence, Faith becomes separated from Reason, the 'this-world practical living'. In Catholic culture there could be no such divide. The Faith is reasonable, and Reason leads to Faith. The whole world is transformed, 'to restore all things in Christ', everything is sacralized. Contemplation goes with action and action with contemplation.
This more cultural historical argument certainly appealed to my mind. I was struck by how completely different Protestant culture was to Catholic. Even in the most mundane of all things.
Protestantism seems almost like a grand attempt to take away everything that is human and everything that is Divine and replace them with a set of formulas to 'take on in Faith', then anything goes. I have entitled this essay ‘Martin Luther and the Counter Reformation’, but before I get the Catholic Reformation let me indulge in a minor transgression. One of my favourite saints (not that they all don’t deserve my veneration) is Saint John Fisher, the little know Martyr Bishop of Rochester. John happens to be the name I took in confirmation. Henry the VIII actually got the title ‘Defender of Faith’ from a book he wrote refuting Martin Luther’s book ‘The Babylonian Captivity of the Church’ which attacked the Seven Sacraments, and the Papacy. St. John Fisher may have advised the king in its writing, but it is unlikely that he wrote it. In any case Dr. Luther in all his glory replied to Henry’s book in characteristic style:
With such blindness and madness has our Lord Jesus Christ stricken the whole kingdom of the Papist abomination that for three years now the Cyclops of their infamous host warring on Luther alone are still at a lose to understand for what reason I am at war with them. In vain do all the books that I have edited and published testify that I seek this one thing only, which is that the Divine Scriptures be given the pre-eminence that is right and just and that all human inventions and traditions be taken out of the way as most hurtful stumbling blocks. For inflicted with chronic insanity they bring nothing against me but the statues of men, the glosses of the Fathers, and the acts of rituals of past centuries. Those very thing which I denyand impugn and which they themselves confess to be untrustworthy and often erroneous. Of such a character is the book of the King of England who does nothing but perpetually cast in my teeth the traditions of men, glosses of fathers, and the use of past centuries. He rages, he curses, he is all vituperation and viperous because, I wish to be considered more learned, more holy and more important than all the rest of mankind.This new god (Henry VIII) fixes as necessary articles of faith for us all, whatever has been said or done by the custom of men, which articles unless I believe he makes of me in his furious anger a heretic. I know not what kind of monster, where pray did this new god The King Of England come from, this creator of new articles of Faith? Till now I have heard of but one God with the right to make articles of Faith, and to require belief in them. In fact this new god who goes beyond the other madmen brings in a new madness. For the other madmen have endeavoured to pervert the Scriptures that I have brought forward and give them another meaning, but have dared nothing without alleging and boasting of Scripture support. But this new god, marvellously confident and cocksure, that owing to his divinity whatever he says must be done, or has already been done, testifies by his own confession that he wishes to set aside my chief foundation, and leave it for others to attack, while he only attacks what I have built upon it. He wishes, with straw and hay to fight against the rock of the Word of God. So that one cannot tell whether he acts so from sheer madness or whether Henry’s stupidity is innate in Henry’s head. Justifying a proverb, ‘A man must be born a King or a Fool’.
Then let not King Henry impute it to me, but to himself if he meets with ruff and harsh treatment at my hands. He does not come forth to battle with a royal mind or with any drop of royal blood, but with a slavish and impudent, and strumpet like insolence and sillyness, proving nothing by arguments but only by cursings. And what is more disgraceful in a man, and especially a man in the highest position, than openly and deliberately to be, so that you can recognise him as such as a sophist, a preacher of ignorance and virulence. He would deserve some consideration if he had erred like a man, but when knowingly and designingly, this damnable and offensive worm, forges lies against the majesty of my King in Heaven, it is right for me on behalf of my King to spatter his Anglican royal Highness with his own mud and filth and cast down and tumble under foot the crown which blasphemeth Christ. If I have trampled down for Christ’s sake the rival of the Roman abomination after it had stood itself in the place of God, and had made itself the ruler of kings and of the whole world, who is this Henry? This new Thomist? This disciple of the idle monsters? That I should treat with respect his poisonous blasphemies? Let him be the defender of the Church, but let him know that the Church of which he boast and upholds is the Church of the Scarlet Women, drunk with wine of her fornications. Both that Church, and him, who I consider its defender, I will attack with same firmness, and with Christ as my leader I will demolish them both.
See here the unhappy Satan, how he crawls, how he wriggles, how he tries subterfuges, but in vain he will not escape. I have rejected and do reject the Canon [of the Mass] because it is quite openly against the Gospel and gives the name of Sacrifices to what are signs of God, added to his promise and are given to us to be received by us, not to be offered up. But I, against the sayings of the Fathers, of men, of Angles, of devils, place not ancient usage, not multitudes of men, but the Word of the One Eternal Majesty the Gospel, which they are forced to approve and in which the Mass is clearly said to be a sign and testament of God, wherein he promises he Grace confirming it with a sign. This is Gods word and work not ours, here I stand, here I sit, here I remain, here I glory, here I triumph, here I laugh at the Papist, Thomist, Henry, Sophist, and all the gates of Hell. Nay at the sayings of men however saintly and at the fallacious customs. The Word of God is above all the Divine Majesty makes me care not at all of a thousand Augustine’s, a thousand Cyprian’s, or a thousand of Henry’s Churches should stand against me. God can utter or be deceived, Augustine and Cyprian and all the elect could err and have erred. Answer me now Lord Henry, be a man now defender, write books now. Thy curses are nothing, thy accusations have no effect, thy lies I despise, thy threats do not frighten me, thou art stupid in this passages as is a block and at other times art nothing but words.
Having triumphed over the Mass I think we have triumphed over whole Papacy. For upon the Mass, as upon a rock is built the whole Papacy, with its monasteries, its Bishoprics, its collages, its alters, its ministers, its doctrines, and leans on it with its whole weight and all these things must fall with the sacrilegious and abominable Mass. So Christ, through me, has begun to unmask the abominations standing in the Holy place and to destroy him whose coming was through the operation of Satan in all wonders and line miracles.
In conclusion, if my ruff speech towards to the king of England offends my man, let him have this for his reply. I am dealing in this book with heartless monsters who have despised all my good and modest writings, and from my humility have become more hardened. In spite of that I kept from the virulence and lying in which the kings book is [laden] nor is it much if I despise and bite this earthy king, since he has not feared with his words to blaspheme the king of heaven, and to take away by his virulent lies from His Holiness. The Lord judges the nations in righteousness. Amen.”
This passage demonstrates for me a further weakness in Luther. He does not attempt to refute Henry's arguments. Instead this passage appears as the ravings of a madman. His petulent, virulent, rhetoric cover the fact that he does not present an argument in return. He meerly sneers at his opponant, in this case Henry, and declares himself a winner. St. John Fisher never descended into this sort of shouting match. He was always firm, but charitable. This is true of all the Saints of the Counter-Reformation. They really are sainty, if one looks to the founders of Protestantism compared with the loyal servants of Catholicism one encounters a marked difference. It did not matter even, for Luther who he attacked, they might have been on his side, but for their minor disagreements on some doctrine or other. Hence, Protestantism started out a divided house. It really justifies the adage, 'Outside of the Church is only Chaos. (This returns to my point from the last post, Catholic saints actually are saintly, and amazingly so)
It just so happened that while I was doing this course on Martin Luther I was also doing a course on early modern Europe. This included the Reformation more generally, it also included the Counter-Reformation, the Wars of Religion, the English Civil War, all of them in very general terms. This was a very interesting module, I just so happened to study in greater detail Spain. Here the Catholic Reformation was strongest. The Hapsburg monarchs remained loyal to Rome. It has long been established and understood that Catholic Spain has been the subject of ‘Black Legends’. Needless to say a majority of popular history relating to Spain is sheer nonsense. Philip II was not only a good king, but he was a devout Catholic as well. The inquisition is also the subject of a black legend, ‘millions’ can be seen in books. Frankly, when I encountered the lies and distortions of history that had been perpetrated by popular, protestant or secular historians I was not filled with confidence. I could not understand why the Church had such bad press. I remember that a friend of mine said that they were confused by a statement made by some anti-Catholic writer ‘I think I may be unpopular for saying this’ and then following on with an anti-Catholic rant. In actual fact, the way to ensure that one gets everyone gets on your side is to make a popular anti-Catholic statement. (Sex scandals, dark ages, conservative, backward, medievalist, integralist, perennialist, hate monger, war mongering, monarchist, anti-modern, un-progressive, not with the times, stuck in the past, your opinion etc. etc.)
In any case while I was getting to know early modern Europe I was also getting to know something of the Counter-Reformation. The Council of Trent greatly impressed me. Here was a Church evidently suffering, seemingly defeated by Protestantism, simony, nepotism, a superstitious clergy and laity, decadence, indifferentism, and general all round worldliness, suddenly emerging triumphant. Pope Paul III called the council in 1545, he was the last of the Medici Popes, it carried on through several popes and closed in 1663. It marks a major turning point in reform in the Church. It effectively wiped out all the clerical abuses, including pluralism (holding of more than one benefice, or office, not the modern dictatorship of relativism), it demonstrated that Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture were equal parts of revelation. It confirmed the seven sacraments, it codified the Scriptures, including the books considered 'Aprocrypha' by Luther, and denied the doctrines of Sola Fide and Sola Scriptura.
More interesting are the Counter-Reformation saints: John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, John Fisher, Thomas More, Pius V, Francis de Sales, John Houghton, Philip Neri, Vincent de Paul, Peter Claver, Jerome Emiliani, Peter Canisius, Peter Fourier, Edmund Campion, Peter of Alcantara, Francis Borgia, Robert Francis Romulus Bellarmine, Cesare Baronius to name a number of them. It would be impossible to give details of all of them, however just the sheer volume of Saints is incredible.
All in all, I left for Easter in a daze. I saw on the one hand Martin Luther and the Reformation, an exercise of personal will against common sense. On the other hand I saw the Catholic Reformation, a triumphant restoration, creating some of the most magnificent cultural pieces of Music, Art, Sculpture, Buildings, Devotional works, bursting with holiness and piety, true reform of abuses and holding itself together against both internal strife and the sieges of the Ottomans. I had also lost all confidence in evangelical religion, with its anti-intellectualism, and biblical fideism. I found little of substance in current Anglican religion just an empty husk, of a past religion, to put it mildly I felt a definite sense of the 'Real Absence'. While at the same time I was coming to know more and more of 'Romish', 'Popery'and 'Popedom', 'superstition', 'priestcraft', 'scholastic sophistry' and all the rest. That is to say I had finished my catechism, and was wondering how to become a Catholic.
The last sacraments I received in the Protestant rite came actually from my Grandfather. It was the Easter Communion service in the Methodist Church. I remember approaching the alter rails thinking, 'I am Catholic in all but name, yet here I kneel ready to receive'. I crossed myself, received the sacrament, sat and regretted having come to the Easter service. I have not set foot in a Protestant Church for the purposes of worship since. There was another thing that was on my mind at this time as well, namely Tradition. The Mass, Vatican II and everything that constitutes 'Modern' Catholicism. This is the subject of another post
To be continued...
(P.S. I have in this Post quoted excessively long extracts. I generally avoid this, as it often gives the impression that author has not understood the thing he has read, or that he is lazy in his researches. I have opted to quote these passages however, because I prefer for them to speak for themselves, particularly the Luther quotes. In the case of the Dawson quote, his eloquence is such that I felt it a disservice not to let him speak for himself. I hope the quotes are not so tedious a thing to read, I beg your patience)
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