February 2019
Canterbury Corrected: 2
In the Evening Standard of 27/10/17, an article penned by Anglican leader Justin Welby lauded Martin Luther and attributed Western progress to the rise of Protestantism. In this second part of his letter to Mr Welby, John Burke continues his comprehensive rebuttal of the many spurious claims (quoted in italics) which litter the article. Having just set the 'Archbishop' right about vernacular translations of the Bible (viz., that Catholic biblical printings in the vernacular long preceded the Protestant ones), he goes on:
“The arts, sciences and literature flourished, thanks to
the Bible becoming available in each person’s language.”
The above applies to this claim too, even if one sets aside that the Bible in Latin was in the language of people who pursued arts and science. They were the mediaeval monks and many nobles; and much of the ecclesiastical art, such as the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham and the shrine of St Thomas at Canterbury, was destroyed by the Reformation. Statues and pictures, thus sculpture and painting, were held to be idolatrous by your pioneering predecessors.
As for the monastic orders, they constituted the multi-national corporations of the Middle Ages, so they had the wherewithal for both art and science. St Gall’s old library has a display of herbal medicine as does the hospice in Beaune. The Dissolution of the Monasteries destroyed monastic research and social welfare.
What also makes nonsense of your claim is that access to the Good Book was strictly limited due to illiteracy, print-run and cost. An early printed Bible cost the equivalent of three year’s wages of a clerk, and although the Bible had been in English since 1382, only one man in ten and no woman could read in the time of Cranmer and Luther. It was still only six men out of ten and fewer females in 1820 when a mere 12% of the population worldwide was literate. So much for the Reformation! It was industrial and military technology — both given a boost by the Napoleonic wars — that demanded literacy which owed as much to state education and private patronage as to Sunday school.
Besides, art, sciences and literature had all flourished under the civilisations of Greece and Rome as well as China (take the great Sung Dynasty). It was the rediscovery of things Greek and Roman that inspired that phenomenon known as the Renaissance that began in Florence two centuries before Luther’s day.
The importance of the positive Renaissance, far overshadowing the negative religious Revolution that followed is summed up in Renaissance Italy by Jacob Burckhardt, the son of a Protestant clergyman in Basle. The blurb for the Mentor edition of 1961, when you would have access, hails “a world of political ferment and social upheaval whose intellectual progress and artistic achievements have never been surpassed …”
Religious architecture had reached its peak in the mediaeval cathedrals that still stand, including Westminster Abbey and Canterbury Cathedral, stolen from the Catholic Church. Protestantism was for austere buildings, to which the Catholic reaction was Baroque and Rococo. Civil architecture was inspired by the Renaissance, as witness stately homes along the Loire for the Catholic nobility.
Sculpture also developed during the Renaissance and so did painting. The technical breakthrough that allowed it to flourish was the use of oil by Dutch artists and canvas by Venetian ones before Luther was born. Among the many Catholic masters of sculpture and painting was Leonardo da Vinci who was also an inventor.
As for musical instruments, many date back to the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians. Modern development began in 1400; the first printed book on organs and other instruments were in German from Sebastian Virdung and Arnold Schlick in 1511 and 1512. Once again, Germanic progress and printing pre-dated Luther’s opus.
Regarding the organ, a monk named Theophilus Presbyter discussed them in a Latin treatise of the tenth century. The religious revolutionaries of the sixteenth and seventeen century ripped many pipe organs out of churches, and the so-called Reformers and Puritans had no time either for the accompanying Catholic plain chant, standardised by St Gregory the Great who was pope from 590 to 604, and which Vatican II said should have primacy in sung worship.
I find no Protestant impetus to music — Luther was for boisterous hymn-singing — whereas Baroque developed in the Catholic countries, even mineiro barroco in [the Brazilian city of] Ouro Preto MG [Minas Gerais] which is a favourite of a priest I know in Brazil. The only new musical instruments of note since the Reformation seem to be for jazz which is of African origin and emerged in New Orleans, again hardly a bastion of Protestantism.
Returning to science, it should be necessary only to quote C.V. Wedgwood of Oxford in her Thirty Years War: “Luther had cried out against the ‘harlot reason’.” In other words, he distrusted science which he wanted subordinated to faith. If there was a natural science club in Rostock, so also was there one in Rome. Again, the Renaissance encouraged some natural science, as mentioned on several pages in the book by Burckhardt who nearly became a Protestant divine like his father.
Concerning your vague claim about science, of which there are a dozen branches, many were already flourishing before the so-called Reformation: Babylonian astronomy, Greek mathematics, Roman engineering, Chinese manufacturing … And to quote Homer in the Odyssey, “The Egyptians were skilled in medicine more than any other art”. Setting that aside, your claim is so sweeping that the rest of my counter-argument has to be a confused collection of random, typical facts.
Chinese inventions such as gunpowder came to Europe via the Mongols or Moslems. The first canon was invented in 1355 by a Catholic friar in Germany. Chinese and Arabian navigators had magnetic compasses that came to Europe in the same century, supplanting the Viking sόlarsteinn. The first mechanical clocks came out of monasteries, such as one made for Pope Sylvester in Magdeburg in AD 996.
It is more likely that the Renaissance, with its rediscovery of the Classics, and the Voyages of Discovery with their finding of strange materials and methods spurred invention, including tools for seafaring. The global map of Fra Mauro, a Venetian monk, was a landmark in 1450, while Mercator’s standard projection of the world came out of Antwerp, which remained Catholic, in 1569. Vasco da Gama’s crew (Catholics to a man) discovered citrus as a cure for scurvy in 1497, but despite the Reformation, the secret was forgotten until 1911 when Scott went to the South Pole.
In astronomy, Galileo and Copernicus both had a Catholic background. It was Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 who corrected the calendar. Ireland was one of the lands to adopt it at once, but Protestant areas such as Britain, Sweden and the American colonies would not accept it for another two centuries. So much for Reformation science! Nietzsche said Luther sabotaged the Renaissance (see quote below.)
The prosperous Dutch relied on windmills long before, and long after, the Reformation, but this largely Protestant nation left it to Benjamin Franklin, a Freemason in America, and others to discover electricity. Ironically, the pioneering Philips light-bulbs were made by a Jew in the most Catholic part of the Netherlands. We must go back to the quotation at the start of this article that shows how the Catholic part of the Low Countries industrialised just as fast as the northern half.
Karl Benz invented the motor-car in Catholic Baden, but Germans did not invent the steam-engine. War or defence also spur science when the industrial hinterland is secure. It was the shortage of horses or fodder, caused by the Napoleonic Wars that led England to develop steam-trains, while two World Wars led to the explosion of civil aviation, and the jet-engine plus spatial exploration. Atheistic communism caused the Cold War that brought us the Internet. War or defence also spur science when the industrial hinterland is secure. .
“Christians learnt to hate and kill each other, even more than they had done ...”
This suggests that Christians were killing each other on religious grounds before the Reformation, after which it got worse. The historical facts are otherwise, including the fact that heresies (breakaways from Catholicism) before Protestantism involved little territorial war. From AD 33 until 1517 there were all kinds of wars involving Romans and barbarians as well as dynastic quarrels within, and conflicts between, the very nations that you suggest did not develop until post-Luther. Setting aside 1066, prominent examples are the Hundred Years War and Wars of the Roses. There was also fighting between Christian crusaders and Islam all around the Mediterranean as well as the German Drang nach Osten against pagans.
Warfare in the last 500 years suggests that ideology, imperialism, militarism and politics were more widespread causes than religious strife. Even the Thirty Years War developed from denominational divisions into dynastic, territorial and commercial ambitions, with Catholic France and Protestant Sweden in the forefront.
“opened the way to the development of much stronger ideas of the nation state ...”
This clumsy sentence should read ‘paved the way for defining nation-states’, but it is not true anyway! Luther & Co. did nothing to increase the already developed sense of nationhood in the lands that follow with their given dates of foundation — and note that the last six are all mentioned as powers in your own handbook, the Bible, including Israel whose reinstatement as a nation it prophesied: Japan (AD 300), Russia (AD 862), China (BC), Egypt (32nd century BC), Ethiopia (700 BC), Greece (800 BC), Iran (625 BC), Israel (1000 BC), Syria (3000 BC).
Again, Protestantism did nothing to increase nationalism in the colonies of European powers, as most of them gained independence as republics, inspired by the atheistic revolution in France, but overwhelmingly Catholic. Examples are Mexico whose nationhood stems from the Spanish language and the Aztec civilisation, and Brazil whose Portuguese language unified all kinds of immigrants, half of them African pagans.
In the case of the 13 American colonies, they united despite Protestant divisions, and the eventual United States became a melting-pot of nationalities; 23% of its current citizens are Catholics whose ancestry goes back to Ireland, Italy, Poland … Canada is another strong state, but it united three distinct nationalities, English, Scottish and French plus immigrants from a score of countries. South Africa is a state created by the British and Dutch, but by no means a nation, as 79% of its inhabitants come from African tribes, including ten major ones.
As to western Europe, well, France, Spain, England, Poland, Hungary, Portugal and Sweden were already established in the early Middle Ages with their own monarchies. While the Papal States straddled the Italian peninsula, Protestantism did nothing to help linguistic identity, as enabled by Dante and espoused by Machiavelli, and Italy’s unity was achieved thanks only to the effects of the atheistic French Revolution.
“The Europe of the Reformation era therefore consisted of a number of national states, in varying degrees developed as effective political units….”
This quotation comes from Reformation Europe 1517-1559, published in 1963 in good time for you to have read it at Eton or Cambridge where it must have been in the library. The author is none other than G.R. Elton, Fellow of Clare College, your very own alma mater. Mgr Philip Hughes in his Reformation says of France and the German empire:
“Both these powers will be shaken to the foundations by the religious revolution in one or other of its phases”. He also points out that Luther benefited from Germanic nationalism (in other words, he did not create it).
French unity was threatened by the Huguenots of Calvin whose Geneva joined the Swiss confederation as late as 1815, twelve years after Catholic Ticino. It says much for the Alpine sense of community that Zwingli failed to split Switzerland where Lucerne, ‘the Catholic Canton’, was to remain a bastion of papal influence.
Oddly enough, the one linguistic area to be completely fragmented by Protestantism, including the Anabaptist theocracy in Münster, was ... Germany, which did not become a unified state until 1871 to include Bavaria, Rhineland, Baden and Würtemberg — all Catholic areas. See the quote from Winder at the start of this letter, and then note how Luther wrecked any prospect of German unity through the League of Schmalkalden, a military alliance of Protestant princes against the Emperor Charles who was aided by Pope Paul III:
“The man who in the years 1534-6 had led the Lutherans to their remarkable triumphs was now instrumental in wrecking their public credit and the united purpose of their defensive league”
To continue with what has become Germany as we know it, the Treaty of Augsburg created a chequerboard of principalities within the Holy Roman Empire where the official religion depended on whether the local ruler was Catholic or Protestant. Any hope of a Reich was dashed by the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) that had religious causes and political ends, and which devastated and depopulated the Germanic heartland; 2,200 castles, 18,000 villages and 1,500 towns such as Magdeburg, Frankfort and Mainz were destroyed.
C.V. Wedgwood in her Thirty Years War goes further: “The economic decline of Germany ante-dates the war by many years, while Germany’s political disintegration was a cause rather than an effect of the war.”
So much for your claim that Luther, touting a Bible in the vernacular, inspired German nationhood. Worst of all, you forget that your own boss, Almighty God, created the nations out of Babel (Gen. 1:6). A score of national territories are named, and the word ‘nations’ is mentioned more than 30 times in the Old or New Testament.
“different kingdoms and principalities … now known as the United Kingdom”
The Reformation did not turn them into a stronger nation-state, not least because the start of the British Empire was Cabot’s discovery of Newfoundland 20 years before Luther’s revolt. Already, there were only two kingdoms, England and Scotland, and one principality, Wales, plus the Duchy of Cornwall as well as colonised Ireland whose last High King preceded the Norman invasion. Far from consolidating the British Isles into a single realm, the Reformation soon made Scotland and Ireland a greater danger to England than before. Cromwell destroyed monarchical continuity, and caused the Ulster problem that continues to this day. It is precisely because of the Protestant colonisation from Scotland that the Republic of Ireland does not control the entire island that was a free Gaelic nation until the twelfth century.
“Faith is now conventionally a personal choice, rather than something imposed by our society.”
This owes nothing to Protestantism, and today it is due to the spread of atheism, agnosticism, materialism and secularism that can now engineer civil law contrary to Christian ethics on such matters as oaths, divorce, abortion, sodomy and Sunday trading. As we Catholics know to our cost, society imposed Protestantism on England from the Act of Supremacy in 1534 (barring Mary Tudor’s five years) until the Catholic Relief Act of 1829, and for a century after that there was discrimination such as barring Catholics from Oxford and Cambridge.
There is something even worse about this particular claim of yours. You are implying that Christianity itself is optional, as if originally stemming from law and custom or a self-made papacy rather than Jesus Christ himself, so that, on your basis, He would have to tolerate sceptics on the Day of Judgement.
“Economically, there were creative and innovative developments – especially in finance and banking. It became acceptable to charge interest on loans, which led to the sort of economic development that was not possible before.”
This looks to me as if a PR man at Lambeth Palace has told you that many copies of the Evening Standard are picked up at the four mainline stations serving the City, including Canon Street. Unfortunately, besides being tautological (five words should have been reduced to “economic innovations”), what you say either preceded the Reformation or else resulted from other
forces afterwards.
Banking, with loans and deposits, has been traced back to 2000 BC. Interest reached 12% in ancient Athens and 10% in Rome. We know from Cicero that the ancient Romans had partes, the equivalent of corporate stocks.
Modern banking goes back to the Italian city-states, with the Medici’s bank founded 1397 and the extant Monte dei Paschi established in 1472. Luther was born eleven years later, and was still a toddler when the Fugger bank opened in Augsburg. To quote Elton again: “Capitalism was fully grown in Italy and south Germany long before Luther.”
He also points out that Luther’s theological adversary, Johann Eck, was in favour of charging reasonable interest, say at 5%. It is noted elsewhere that he defended this policy at Augsburg in 1514 and in Bologna in 1515 — thus, before the open revolt at Wittenberg. Doubtless, he remembered (as has obviously been forgotten by you, the religious professional on £41,000 a year) that Christ berated the man who hoarded his one talent: “Then you should have deposited my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received my money back with interest!” (Matt. 25:14-30) What the Catholic Church deplored was usury, that is exorbitant interest.
The first stock-exchange was in the mansion of the van der Beurze (or Buerse) family some time before 1340. It served the Hanseatic League, formed in 1356 to foster trade between 190 cities in 16 lands — a forerunner of the European Economic Community. Otherwise, the first of today’s stock exchanges opened in Amsterdam in 1602 to finance the East Indian Company, and but for the Protestant rebellion against the Holy Roman Empire, the world’s financial hub would have remained in Antwerp.
Antwerp controlled 40% of the world’s trade just before the Reformation, and lent money to Henry VIII at 13%. In fact, it was the Reformation that caused Antwerp’s collapse, and the shift of banking and commerce to Amsterdam that boomed due to the influx of precious metals and rare goods from the New World.
I suggest that the upheaval of the sixteenth century owed much to the Renaissance begun in the fourteenth century, with the attendant humanism of Erasmus who clung to Catholicism, and the Voyages of Discovery by Catholic mariners from Spain, Portugal and Genoa that began one century before the landsman, Luther, revolted.
“That was Luther’s immense discovery: the grace and love
of God for human beings in all their failings and faults.”
Luther discovered nothing. Surely, anyone could see this in the Gospels, as expounded in sermons, such as Jn. 3:16 as well as in Paul’s epistles to the Romans and Corinthians. God’s grace was explained long before Luther by St Augustine of Hippo in his Retractions and by St Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologica.
“... not because we do good works but because we trust in God”
It seems that you do not know your own professional manual, namely the Bible. St Paul repeatedly stresses the importance of good works in his letter to Titus and in his epistle to the Romans. James, the very epistle Luther suppressed (see above), insists on good works as well as faith, St John agrees in Apoc. 20:12-13, all of them going back to Matt 25. I suspect that whilst Paul stresses faith elsewhere, he is concerned that it is not enough to do charity for merely social reasons.
Returning to your historical apotheosis, Hellmut Gollwitzer in his Luther (1955) says he was as mediaeval and modern, ranks Erasmus and St Teresa as like figures, and quotes Nietsche’s condemnation: “den großen Verhinderer des Sieges der Renaissance”.
There is no better way of closing this refutation of your superficial article than by yet again quoting the academic from your own Cambridge college, who charges Max Weber, the German sociologist, with similar woolliness, and his book with striking weaknesses just as did the writer quoted at the start of this article. Elton adds:
“To sum up, there is no good reason for linking Protestantism and capitalism in the significant relationship for so long accepted as certain. Weber started with an axiom which simply was not true: that a special kind of capitalist spirit distinguished post-Reformation Europe and was most marked in Protestant countries.”
In short, your obvious mistake, in words that Luther and Zwingli would have understood, is das Pferd auf dem Schwanz aufzuzäumen or, in the language of Calvin: mettre la charrue devant deux boeufs. If you cannot get facts right in even a short essay, you cannot be intellectually fit to grasp Catholic theology and liturgy.
With regret, it seems to me that you would do better to concentrate on studying like Newman and Manning did in order to come over to Rome rather than indulging in empty gestures inside Westminster Cathedral and hobnobbing with the true Catholic primate for the prestige that these provide. Unfortunately, I have no evidence that Cardinal Nichols has publicly corrected either your article (a letter to the Evening Standard or Times would suffice) or the misleading blurb put out by PR at Lambeth Palace. Sad to say, so-called ecumenism remains a flop, a fiction and a failure, while conversions to Catholicism have plummeted, offset only by those of Anglican refugees from heretical novelties such as priestesses that the original Reformers would have called anathema.
Remember, the readership of the Evening Standard ranges from atheists and pagans to heretics and Catholics, including semi-educated Catholics who cannot be expected to have a close knowledge of history and/or other subjects that you mention. Therefore, you have misled them all in a frantic and feeble attempt to do PR for the ruinous Reformation and salvage some respectability from it.
In the public interest (it might be better to say Heaven’s interest) this rebuttal will have to be sent now to Eton and Clare College as well as Buckingham Palace, Archbishop’s House and Derry Street among other places. It will also have to be sent to the editors of the main media as and when you issue any further statement amid political or religious controversy. Your errors have to be taken most seriously.
Yours faithfully
J. B. Burke
© John Burke 2018