It shaped your life and mine, and that of billions of other people
since.
Yet few realise that anymore.
It led to creation of the United States of America, Europe as it is today, most of Africa,
modern capitalism and its proliferation, the ascendancy of the
individual, the existence of democracy as we now know it, and the
evolution, geo-politically, of “the West”.
More locally it has had profound
implications for the inhabitants of this island, up to and including
this day. It has defined our configuration as a people, our
institutions, and many of our laws, north and south.
We are what we are because of the Reformation. You might say that in Ireland, even our current decade of commemorations is rooted in the Reformation.
When 33-year-old Augustinian friar Fr Martin Luther sent his Ninety-five Theses to the Archbishop of Mainz
on October 31st 1517, he had no idea what he was starting. Professor of
Theology at the University of Wittenberg, he later posted the theses on
the door of All Saints Church there.
What he intended as the beginning
of a theological dialogue set in train events that have shaped the world
as it is today, half a millennium later.
The impact of his ideas was due
primarily to a media innovation of his day – the printing press,
invented by Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz the previous century.
Assisting
this was the translation of Luther’s Theses, the Bible, and sundry
church documents into the German vernacular.
Excommunicated
For the first time the mass of
people had direct access to documents fundamental to their culture. They
were no longer dependant on an elite, proficient in Latin and Greek,
for knowledge of these or their interpretation. They had no further need
of “experts”.
Of course Fr Luther’s ideas also fell on fertile ground. Two years earlier, in 1515, Pope Leo X
granted a plenary indulgence (removal of punishment for sins) to
everyone who helped pay for the construction of St Peter’s Basilica in
Rome, that magnificent edifice which was to cost so much.
Those who made such offerings would escape purgatory on death and go straight to heaven. In his letter to Albert of Brandenburg, Archbishop of Mainz, Fr Luther questioned whether selling such indulgences was an abuse.
He would go on to preach that
faith in Jesus alone was all that was necessary for salvation and then
to challenge papal authority.
In January 1521 he was
excommunicated by Pope Leo X. It was too late. Luther was soon the most
widely read author of his time. His ideas took hold and would have an
influence far beyond anything anyone anticipated.
It was not always good. Over 400
years later it would be claimed that almost every anti-Jewish book
printed during Germany’s 20th century Third Reich era contained
references to, and quotations from, Luther.
He described Jews as “the devil’s
people” and “envenomed worms”. He said: “We are at fault in not slaying
them.” Three days before his death in February 1546 he described Jews as
“our public enemies . . . and if they could kill us all, they would
gladly do so.”
Ireland an exception
What followed his death was mayhem
and slaughter in Europe. Violent clashes between Protestants and
Catholics in 16th and 17th century wars of religion were some of the
longest-lasting and most destructive in history, with millions killed.
Some estimates put the figure at 11.5 million.
The Roman Catholic Church
initiated what became known as the Counter Reformation, reaffirming its
teachings, reforming structures and disciplines, but, above all,
condemning Protestantism. Central to this was the Council of Trent,
which continued from 1545 to 1563.
It put in place the Catholic Church
as it would remain, more or less, up to the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.
Europe’s wars of religion,
including within these islands, were as much political as religious, if
not more political than religious in a way that would be familiar to
most people on this island following the conflict in Northern Ireland.
In Europe they concluded with the
Peace of Westphalia in 1648 which reaffirmed an agreement that people
would assume the denomination of their ruler, according to the principle
“cuius regio, eius religio”(whose realm, his religion). In effect it
meant that almost all of northern Europe, except Ireland, became
Protestant.
By then the two primary movements within Protestantism were Lutheranism and the Reformed tradition which began in Geneva under John Calvin.
These Protestant churches emphasised an equality between laity and clergy absent in Roman Catholicism, while those in the Reformed denominations extended this to include laity in church governance.
Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, Methodists were soon organised along the lines of representative democracy.
A downside to this was the
inevitability of Protestantism splintering. It seems the destiny of
movements in which central authority is rejected. Splits and violence
soon occurred among different Protestant groupings in post-Reformation
Europe too.
Capitalism and the Protestant ‘work ethic’
It was why the Puritans left England
in the 1620s for the New World in pursuit of a religious freedom which
they saw as under threat from Anglicans/Church of England.
Those Protestants who founded the Plymouth Colony (1620) and the Massachusetts
Bay Colony (1628) in America’s New England believed that a democratic
form of government was the will of God in its recognition of the rights
and will of the individual.
Their thinking would find its way
into the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776.
Overtime, it
would even influence the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights.
It takes little imagination to see
how such ideas found their way back across the Atlantic as empires,
monarchies and dictatorships dissolved in the 20th century and how they
played a key role in the creation of today’s democracies in Europe, but
also in former colonies in South America, Africa, Asia and Australasia and in Canada.
And no country in the world is
more closely associated with capitalism than the US. This is not
entirely coincidental, if one accepts the thesis of German sociologist Max Weber.
In his fascinating 1905 essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism, he argued that the growth of capitalism was helped by
particular Protestant values.
Worldly success/profit was
interpreted by certain branches of Protestantism as evidence of God’s
favour and so was deemed worthy of pursuit.
This created what Weber
termed “the Protestant work ethic”.
He noted how countries with more
Protestants were generally those with a more developed capitalist
economy.
Accumulating wealth
Encouraged to work with zeal, to
be frugal and avoid luxuries, wealth soon accumulated among austere
Protestants who, in turn, invested it “so that the profits rise quicker
and quicker”, Weber said, quoting from ethical writings of Puritan and
US founding father Benjamin Franklin.
Red in tooth and claw capitalism
may also have its roots in such Protestantism. Where it was concerned
“donation of money to the poor or to charity was generally frowned on as
it was seen as furthering beggary. This social condition was perceived
as laziness, burdening their fellow man, and an affront to God; by not
working, one failed to glorify God,” Weber said.
He believed, however, that the
religious underpinnings of the Protestant work ethic had largely
disappeared by the time he wrote his essay.
There are those who would argue
that the Protestant work ethic never really caught on in Ireland either
except, that is, for the Protestant industrial north- east part around Belfast.
As with most things then, the
Reformation was late in coming to Ireland, and for the usual reasons –
location and language. An island off an island in the most westerly part
of Europe, Ireland was difficult to get to, and the people spoke a
language unfamiliar to most everyone else.
For instance, it was 1603 before
the first translation of the New Testament in Irish was published: 86
years after Luther posted his Theses. By 1521 Luther had translated the
New Testament into German. The first New Testament in English, by William Tyndale, was published in 1526.
Protestantism was well-established in England, Wales, and Scotland
by the end of the 16th century. This was not the case in Ireland. Alone
among the countries of northern Europe it remained stubbornly resistant
to this new version of Christianity.
Rejected the Reformation
The vast majority of Ireland’s
population at the time rejected the Reformation as an outside
imposition. Meanwhile the Counter Reformation had been gaining ground in
Europe and growing numbers of Irish Catholic priests and scholars began
to arrive in continental university cities.
In the 16th and 17th century Irish colleges sprang up in Spain and Flanders, then France, Rome and central Europe. By the middle of the 17th century there were more than 40 such colleges stretching from Prague to Lisbon and Leuven to Rome.
This resistance to Protestantism
in Ireland was met by London with savage force, religious persecution,
confiscations, plantations, and penal laws.
These latter were described by 18th century Dublin-born MP Edmund Burke
as “a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, as well fitted for the
oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the
debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the
perverted ingenuity of man”.
From 1607 these laws forbade Catholics, Presbyterians, and others who did not belong to the Church of Ireland
(Anglicans) state religion, any education “publicly or in private
houses”.
They had no vote and were not allowed become MPs or hold any
public office.
They were banned from the legal profession, from attending Trinity College Dublin,
from securing a foreign education, from joining the army or holding
firearms. They had to pay a tithe to support the Church of Ireland and
non-attendance at its services was punishable by fines.
Mixed marriages were banned and
children who converted to Protestantism inherited almost all the
father’s property. No Catholic could inherit Protestant land or own a
horse valued at over £5.
A convert from Protestantism to
Roman Catholicism forfeited all rights to their property. Catholic
priests could be executed on sight.
It has been argued that the penal
laws were applied unevenly, both over time and geographically, and that
they had little effect beyond the Pale.
However it was in this period too that Catholic primate and Archbishop of Armagh St Oliver Plunkett was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn in London on July 1st 1681 “for promoting the Roman faith”.
Continuing conflict
And in 1992 Pope John Paul
beatified 17 Irish Catholic martyrs (mostly priests from all over
Ireland) executed between 1579 and 1654 because of their faith.
The purpose of the penal laws was
simple – to reduce Irish Catholics and other non-Anglicans to a
barbarous level of poverty and ignorance.
They operated from 1607 until,
at least de jure, Catholic Emancipation in 1829, though some were not
finally abolished until the 1920 Government of Ireland Act.
They failed to make Ireland
Protestant. Over that same period however, and mainly through
plantations, a quarter of the island’s population did become Protestant.
These were mainly Scots Presbyterians planted in Ulster in the 1640s as well as the 10 per cent Anglican/Church of Ireland elite who ruled the island.
Catholic Emancipation in 1829
marked the beginning of the rise of the Catholic Church in Ireland while
1869 marked a watershed in the downward direction of the Church of
Ireland, with its disestablishment as State church and the dropping of a
requirement on all to pay tithes for its support.
Opposition to the Irish Church Act
of 1869, which brought this about, also led to the creation of one of
the longest non-scientific words in the English language:
antidisestablishmentarianism.
Church division in Ireland, rooted
in the Reformation, continued to have a baleful effect on the island
throughout the 20th century with the creation of two states, one
Protestant, one Catholic.
The twain rarely met.
Then there was that
prolonged period of violence which began in the late 1960s.
The 1998
Good Friday Agreement allowed for something more consensual to emerge.
In Ireland today it would be fair
to say that relations between all its churches, Protestant and the
majority Roman Catholic Church in particular, have never been quite as
good since the Reformation 500 years ago.
However a forthcoming
commemoration could put it to the test. The 150th anniversary of the
Irish Church Act – which disestablished the Church of Ireland – is in
2019.
We shall see then whether our
churches can rise above their continuing divisions to mark this event
without reigniting old bitternesses which have been more characteristic
of their relationships over the past five centuries.
We shall see then whether
unintended consequences of Martin Luther’s actions 500 years ago still
represent a threat to peace in Ireland.