The Protestant Reformation: A Summary By Way Of A Short Compendium

By Stefano Ulliana

Summary description of the Protestant Reformation with an emphasis on the philosophical schools and currents that most influenced it. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Babelcube Inc.
• Release date: Jun 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781071544198

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ENDNOTES

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD

The drafting of this brief essay dedicated to the birth and early development of the Protestant Reformation revolves around an organic series of theoretical and interpretative gravitational poles, which can be quickly outlined and described in the form of questions. These relate to the following:

a) The acquisition of a possible fundamental escape route in the way of thinking about the genesis of modernity (in connection with the interwoven development of the first modern philosophy). Did the Protestant Reformation perhaps give rise to a new possible phase of civilization for the European continent, one in which the Platonizing element (mainly with a transcendent drive) clashes and/or merges with a revitalization of the Aristotelizing Renaissance element (predominantly with immanent radicalism)? Must the question of individual salvation (either according to divine grace and providence or according to merits linked to works) be seen as a screen, through which and beyond which there are factors of a theological-political type which therefore bear within themselves a strong potential for socioeconomic and cultural transformation? Does the prevalence of the transcendentist factor over the immanentist factor immobilize and neutralize the most revolutionary thrusts set in motion by the Reformation? Can we thus speak of a Right (Calvin) and of a Left (gradually more radical and revolutionary: Melanchthon, Zwingli, Müntzer and the Anabaptists) in the Franco-German Protestant theological-political movement? Would the figure of Luther thus represent the Center and the axis of a possible reconstruction of the ancient and traditional way of thinking and living in the Middle Ages with the new impetus for transformation, which would, however, be functional for the limitation and neutralization of its more subversive theological-political forms?

b) How can this problematization make use of the contributions of historical knowledge related to German territorial subdivision during that historical phase? Should Germanic territorial contexts be considered limited to being an opportunity for new freedoms (theological, political, and socioeconomic)?

c) What is the influence of the central pressure of the Holy Roman Empire on these traditional and now innovative forms of freedom? Did the development of the dispute between the central political power and its defense of the ideological cement constituted by the Catholic religion (Charles V) bring the political-hierarchical structure of the Empire into the risk of an explosion? Does it open up, or could it have opened up, completely new solutions that were incompatible with that recomposition between the ancient feudal order and the beginning of a capitalist mercantile process towards which the new ruling forces in the Empire (the Imperial Diet and the Fuggers) seemed to want to push towards?

d) Will the new theological-political arrangement, which was unstable until the middle of the following century (Thirty Years War) and which was different in the different territories of the Empire, essentially and potentially conflict with the accentuation of tendencies towards the concentration of powers, which will rapidly tend, from the establishment of the national monarchies in Europe, to the foundation of states with an absolutist imprint during the modern age (such as the France of Louis XIV)? Is the failure to establish a Germanic unitary state (in addition to the linguistic contribution inferable from Luther's theological-political and literary work) thus valid as a failure in relation to the progress of European historical progress, and not as one of those delays of history itself which – as Ernst Bloch indicated[[i]] – could have anticipated a new and completely different, and revolutionary, future?

e) Can the theme of the birth of the individual conscience, of its autonomy and freedom, of its independence and of its active design determination, be connected with the adventure of a new rational organization of philosophical and scientific knowledge (Telesio, Bruno, Galileo)? Is the principle of theological freedom bound up with that of rational freedom and natural research? Can the initial devaluation of Nature in Luther – due to the predominance of original sin and of the Law – find a solution, always within Luther himself, with the revolution carried out by Divine Love? Does the opening that is decreed here save the same natural consideration and move towards forms of impetus and on to naturalistic studies (according to the Germanic line that connects Paracelsus with Böhme)? In this perspective, could the future German idealism and post-idealism be considered to be the definitive consolidation of the German ideology[[ii]], as a final depository of the intentions for the preservation and mediative (superstructural) Lutheran composition [Marx 1846]? Must the subsequent historical effects that will have the German nation (militarism, imperialism, National Socialism, authoritarian neo-liberalism of Capital) as their subject – with the corresponding political-social and economic, or ideological problems – be seen as the necessary consequence of its continuous recovery and recomposition?

INTRODUCTION

The horizon and the background of medieval civilization – in the theological and psycho-social, and therefore cultural sense, as well as in the broader political sense – was dominated by the concept of an apparently loving God who instilled fear and terror in his enemies, however ambiguously, and who therefore had in himself the prevalence of factors capable of denial and subordination towards a particularly turbulent, rebellious and corrupt lower world, as if it were – an icon of traditional paternalistic masculinity – envious and invidious[[iii]] – as Giordano Bruno later said in his amazing criticism of the ideological process that innervated the development of Western Civilization – of the free creative power of Nature and of Reason, regarded as the extreme personification of diabolical essence and existence. A God who therefore instead showed continuity with the Empire and the constraint of the Law (the Old Testament), rather than the liberation obtained due to the spontaneity and equality of the infinite and universal love (the New Testament and the Spirit of the Christ).

All the heretical forms that had historically passed through this – Catharists[[iv]], Patarines, Albigensians – fixed themselves more on the negation of this negation, with an excess of the same that led to forms of collective self-annihilation, rather than on the reopening of a horizon endowed with a radical propulsive thrust, both from a psychological, as well as from a cultural and political, point of view. On the contrary, the various and recurrent Italian movements of the XIIth, XIIIth, and XIVth centuries, which are linked to the figures of Arnaldo da Brescia (influenced by the Parisian teaching of Abelard), Joachim of Fiore[[v]] (who was eager to transpose the communitarian ideal into an oriental civil sense), Dolcino (with his criticism of the top-down and hierarchical conception of power, both religious and political), Pietro d'Abano[[vi]] (advocate of freedom of movement for the celestial stars themselves and of the dialectical vision of universal composition-decomposition), Marsilius of Padua[[vii]] (who, with his Defensor Pacis [The Defender of Peace], perhaps initiates the division between state power and the theological and ecclesiastical baseline) tended to consider and to positively evaluate the popular and basically democratic contribution to religious life and to political life, to prevent the vertical relationship of power from losing the Church itself within the alienating vortex of dominant power relations (economic, institutional and cultural), and led it to become an instrument of the risky valorization of the new Proto-Bourgeois forces, sought within the new civil forms of the city (the Municipalities), aimed at the dissociation of individual and collective life from religious determinism and the pursuit of happiness and pleasures, which the ideology of immanence (note the recovery of Aristotle) ​​could establish and guarantee (note, also, the literary works of Boccaccio). Thus, while the possible democratic trends of the Municipalities were neutralized in Italy by the advent of the signorie, or lordships, the humanistic movement began to reuse philosophical classicism and ancient Greco-Roman civil and political practices in order to consolidate a form of immanent power, devoid of the necessary theological and/or religious justification, but at the same time suitable for blocking lateral escape routes of an effectively revolutionary type (possibilities that will instead recur at the beginning of the modern age, at least in their theoretical possibilities, with the positions of Giordano Bruno and Baruch Spinoza). The positions of Lorenzo Valla and Niccolò Machiavelli would then be to demonstrate an accepted impossibility of escaping from immanent and/or transcendent political or theological-theological tendencies, which are again Neoplatonizing (from Nicola Krebs to Marsilio Ficino). In this way, the new phase of the ideological development of Western Civilization would see in Italy a debate between two positions which in reality did not allow – each in its own way – any variation and any transformation of that traditional system (Aristotle reconstituted inside of Plato), which nevertheless takes advantage of a higher horizon of absolutely binding determination, and thus a relationship of hegemony and inescapable and necessary power. Both in the case of an overdetermination, as well as in that of a collection of differences linked by the common interest of the regional state in formation, the division, alienation and splitting of the civil and political subject contemplated in itself the neomystical version of infinite will and power (absolute sovereignty of the ruler) and of the neo-Aristotelian one of the abstract separation of virtues and of the socioeconomically and politically or culturally dominant classes (according to the principle of a determination of an oligarchic nature).

Faced with this situation, then, there seems to be a controversy of a purely religious nature – which seems at this point to be almost a mere rearguard action – between a hypothesis of individual salvation linked to the dogmatic determination of the practices linked to good works and the corresponding merit, and a new interpretative hypothesis based on the absolute primacy of the freedom of divine grace, prompted by the famous question of the sale of indulgences, but also connected with German political aspirations towards greater autonomy and a decisive cancellation of all forms of heterodetermination originating from the Pope and the Roman Curia. In this sense, the value of this autonomy and of this self-determination will tend to deny that humanistic proposal (note the dispute between Luther and Erasmus of Rotterdam), again projecting towards a horizon of new absolutism, but at the same time basically democratic (Protestant communities), that will to alienation, and thus reassembling the point of origin of a new phase of activity, tending towards a truly and genuinely new world. One endowed with a new ideological horizon and with new dialectical modalities proposed by the new intersubjective relations (German, Dutch and English, as well as in the newly formed American colonies).

In this context, the primacy of faith, grace and Scripture will therefore take on the value, the meaning and the paradigmatic meaning of a new covenant between the divine and the human that is aimed at constantly reaffirming its original content and its original form (with reference to the source of the New Testament and the questioning of the ecclesiastical tradition as the main justification for salvation), while the final and conclusive horizon of human work in the world will only have to follow the simple, but very complicated, ethical religious (and political) principle of fraternal and infinite love (the true and unique, and real, gift of divine Providence). In this sense, it could also be argued that the German Protestant movement will reject all the humanistic and classical incrustations of the faith, in order to free itself from the mortal embrace with a political and economic power, in which project, however, it will never succeed – with the exception of the more left-wing, radical and revolutionary formations – to continue with their accounts to the end, demonstrating once again the original defect of their own approach: the grip and the necessary coupling to the traditional diagonalization of the Being that establishes, on the one hand (that of Platonic identity), the divine power/will, while it lays down, on the other hand, the limitations and the corruption of the finite entity (following, in this way, the Thomistic approach). Only the restoration of contact with the original and doubly dialectical original of a Living Material that appears as Spirit (infinite and universal) and the reversal from theism to a-theism as a true and real common religiosity will perhaps allow – through Fichte, the original Schelling is the interpretative line that will be born from Feuerbach and Marx – to the German Protestant movement, in order to realize its highest, deepest and most radical aspirations.

FIRST PART – THE PROBLEM REPRESENTED BY THE REFORMATION[[viii]]

If modernity seems to start on the European continent precisely due to the theological, ecclesiastical and political-social upheaval brought about by the theological reflections of Martin Luther – as Protestant historiography has claimed since the nineteenth century –, then it is due to the break with the forced universalism of Roman Catholicism that the spirit of freedom of the new era can soar into the new heavens of a religious ethic and, at the same time, a civilized and political renewal, both open and again creative and strengthened by new promises