Judged on their own terms and with respect to the objectives of their own leading protagonists, medieval Christendom failed, the Reformation failed, confessionalized Europe failed, and Western modernity failed, but each in different ways and with different consequences, and each in ways that continue to remain important to the present.

That is the author’s tactful summation of The Unintended Revolution.  A more pointed one is this:

The Protestant Reformation that began early in the sixteenth century destroyed the unity and the coherence of Christendom, initiating a process of explosive doctrinal fission from which western Christianity, western philosophy, western political theory and institutions, western economics, western society, and western morality have never recovered.

To paraphrase Sir Christopher Wren’s admirer: If you seek the Reformation’s monument, the chaos and rubble are all around you.

Brad Gregory’s scholarly thesis only expresses orthodox Catholicism’s common understanding of the past five centuries of Western history.  For reflective and educated Catholics, his book’s 574 pages (too long by about a third, I should say) will come rather as confirmation than as enlightenment.  It is welcome confirmation, however, while the wealth of historical detail Professor Gregory provides, though smothering at times, is more often than not immensely interesting and useful.  If The Unintended Revolution is a less surprising book than its author and publisher seem to imagine, it is nevertheless an important one, manifestly well directed to our time.

In Professor Gregory’s estimation, the history of early modern Europe and subsequent times shows no historical victors.  Instead, Catholics, Lutherans, Reformed Protestants, and Western Christianity in general lost.  The protracted conflicts produced by the Reformation amount collectively to an extended historical disaster, unintended by its makers, that shaped the history of the West in unforeseen ways that would have horrified them.  From these conflicts arose the theological, philosophical, social, and political conditions that led in time to the ideological secularization of Western institutions in the present day.

The Reformation, Gregory argues, ended more than a millennium of intellectual agreement in the Latin West.  The univocal concept of God’s being as undifferentiated from any other form of being, proposed by the Franciscan friar John Duns Scotus in the 13th century, and the nominalism associated with his younger contemporary and co-friar William of Occam, in combination with the revival of Platonism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism during the Renaissance, produced eventually a deistic theology, a disenchantment with nature, and atheism in its modern form.  It also encouraged a scientific view of the world and promoted the belief that religion and science are essentially incompatible.  The Reformation guaranteed that theology of every sort—Catholic, Protestant, and Reformed—and philosophical speculation related to it should become controversial issues, thus marginalizing Christian doctrine in favor of empiricism.  Christian theology representing every denomination or sect was compelled to present itself as natural theology if it were to escape controversy, and so Western thought came to assimilate God to the natural world.  In this process of assimilation, it was not the Holy that infused nature by degrees; instead the natural infused the Holy, and secularized it.  The result was a desacralized concept of disinterested nature, nature objectivized and awaiting “vexation” (Sir Francis Bacon’s term) by man.  These vexations amount collectively to industrialism, urbanization, and environmental despoliation through the exploitation of resources to maintain and expand the consumerist culture expedited and justified by the “transformation of the morality of acquisitiveness” by Anglophone Protestantism and the writings of Hobbes, Hume, and Adam Smith, a transformation first reified by what Gregory calls the “industrious revolution” in the Dutch Republic in the 17th century.  With all religious doctrine now in dispute, and much of it supposedly discredited, religion itself, from the 17th century on, appeared increasingly dependent on philosophy and in steady retreat before the discoveries of scientific enquiry.  And because—Gregory is firm on this point—there never was, not even at the start of the Reformation, a theological consensus among fissiparous Protestantism, self-affirmed “openness to the Spirit” became the only acceptably authentic Christian claim.

As Brad Gregory shrewdly points out, Martin Luther’s insistence that man’s soul belongs strictly to God implies that the body that houses that soul belongs to the state, in the sense of being subject to it.  This conclusion from Protestant doctrine, together with the need of contemporary princes for theological and social order in their respective realms, gave rise to the confessional regimes of the 16th and 17th centuries and encouraged experimentation by their rulers with the various means available to them by which national governments might control their churches.  Among Gregory’s best insights is his observation that, whatever the prevailing relationship between a state and its church or churches, that relationship—persecutory, strict, lenient, or indifferent—is necessarily determined by the state itself.  Indeed, by the late 16th century, secular rulers controlled churches of every denomination in Western Europe according to a formula that, in Gregory’s view, is essentially the same by which governments manage their churches in the early 21st century.  These experiments in ecclesiastical control by secular authority five centuries ago,

combined in complex ways with other ideological and institutional developments, would eventually make almost impossible the pursuit of the wisdom of God as preached by Jesus, not despite but because modern, liberal states permitted individuals to behave and worship or pray—or none of the above—as they pleased.

The privatization of religious belief was instituted first by the Dutch Republic, where it was much admired by a British ambassador, William Temple, who described its effects in enthusiastic terms in his exchanges with Whitehall.  At the end of the following century, it was incorporated in the U.S. Constitution, whose authors rejected confessional Christianity, in the form of an established church, as an affront to the democratic right to freedom of conscience and an outmoded policy of state that had succeeded only in encouraging the confusion and violence it had sought to forestall.  But the Founding Fathers in their wisdom failed to foresee the implications of their assumptions in respect of the proper relationship between Church and state in a democratic republic.  And so freedom of religion in America, as Gregory astutely observes, had the paradoxical result of protecting society from religion, rather than from an established church.  Thus, it has ended by secularizing society and religion—a result that the Philadelphia convention of 1787, whatever the private theological beliefs of its members, would have deplored, and that led quite naturally to the separation of politics from religion, and finally to the severance of politics from morality itself.

Gregory thinks medieval Christendom failed through “botched moral effort”—that is to say, hypocrisy and the inability to live up to the standards of behavior, private and social, established by Christian teaching.  The theological and institutional response to that shortfall, the Reformation, failed by the inadequacy of its foundational principle to the theological crisis it had precipitated.  Confessionalized Europe failed from its inability to establish nations free from religious dissent, and from the military disasters it incurred throughout the period of religio-political warfare.  And Western modernity is failing through the weakness of its intellectual foundations, whose accepted metaphysical assumptions, in the context of the discoveries of the natural sciences, are insufficient to uphold its fundamental moral, political, and legal claims.

The governing modern ideology of liberalism is failing in multiple respects.  It lacks the intellectual resources to resolve any real-life moral disagreements, to provide any substantive social cohesion, or even to justify its most basic assumptions.

Modern liberalism attempts to disguise its moral and intellectual bankruptcy by invoking “historical supersessionism” and insisting that pre-liberal superstitions and errors have been “‘left behind’ or ‘over-turned’ by ‘modernity’ or ‘reason,’” when in truth they have been “institutionally excluded and ideologically denounced, not disproven.”  Gregory claims that the “hyperpluralism” of the modern West makes dishonesty as a staple of modern Western intellectual discourse inevitable.

The Unintended Revolution is an important work.  More a pity, then, that Brad Gregory has blotted his copybook with barbarities like “hybridities,” ungrammatical usage such as “like” where he means “as if,” “truth claims” for “doctrines,” and habitual references to something he calls “Life Questions,” presumably not of the sort advice columnists seek to resolve.  Lastly, as I have said, The Unintended Reformation is too long by at least a third, and much harder to follow throughout than its perfectly straightforward argument requires.  Nevertheless, what the book says needed badly to be said.  Another way to say this is that it very much deserves to be read, as widely as possible.

 

[The Unintended Revolution: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, by Brad S. Gregory (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) 574 pp., $39.95]