Summarizing Gregory’s research is like writing a Haiku for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet… the oversimplification makes the source sound discreditable. For a historian of Gregory’s caliber, this is very much not the case. The exercise here is my own form of aide-mémoire for the points this book makes. The words in parenthesis are the titles of each of the book’s six chapters.
Summary
Luther, an Augustinian monk, alarmed like so many of his contemporaries at the state of the church, the way its pontiff and cardinals and bishops and priests had deviated from Christ’s example in the Gospel, of love and humility and poverty, concluded that the Catholic church had a flaw in its foundation. Instead of spreading, as it did, with reference to a central figure in Rome and a legacy of tradition from the Church Fathers, the faith, he decided, should come, simply, from the Bible. The Bible, he thought, would not lead people astray, because for him, reading the Bible was clear. Luther, printed his thoughts in German and they spread throughout the population of practicing faithful, also concerned about their church. Were it not for Luther’s passionate fervor or the protection of a Prince, the world would not be what it is today.
If we are inclined to think that the Reformation was a movement that sprung from the Catholic Church, with its own structure and cohesion, this was not the case. Luther in his own lifetime was dismayed that so many interpretations of the Bible, differing from his own, could muddy and complicate what he thought was evident.
(Excluding God) Today, we have science, or more specifically, the natural sciences. Natural sciences allow us to look at the world and measure and understand it and make giant strides in technology. Weber saw this and declared that since there is nothing we can’t know, there is no need for God, “this implies the disenchantment of the world.” [p 26] Disenchantment! So now, there is science and there is faith and the two are separate. How they became separate was a trick of language… a long time ago, God was in everything, and then, as the natural sciences measured and quantified things, and labeled cells and named galaxies, God was outside the arena of things passed under microscopes and observed through telescopes, and so, God became something that was nowhere.
(Relativizing Doctrines) For all the wonder and beauty of natural sciences, they cannot answer questions about life purpose. All the disagreements about what the Bible meant, lead to philosophers turning to reason for consensus. But then reason couldn’t provide a single satisfactory answer, and philosophers only ever continued to ask questions. Eventually this lead to everyone disagreeing with each other and having their own ideas and not arriving at a solution of any kind.
(Controlling the Churches) The way society is organized, with the separation of church and state can be traced in history. When Luther needed a monarch’s protection or risked being put to death, so too did all adopters of various Protestant faiths. Religion became associated with power. Over time, the differences between what people believed to be true became an internal creed that had to be confessed, rather than a guide for a way of being. Depending on the monarch’s convictions, populations were subjected to terrible persecution and so it was better over time to allow for a whole variety of individual convictions without imposing any one thing on everyone. But just as government depended on its citizens to live the virtues of their religion, suddenly religion was being eroded in importance and no longer had a prominent part in nurturing good practices. Society and religion became secularized.
(Subjectivizing Morality) A sense of what is right and wrong is now based on personal feeling with one’s happiness as a guide. Morality became separate from politics from the time of the Renaissance popes who, in shrugging their duty, unwittingly set an example for Machiavelli’s advice to leaders. Centuries later, the American “pursuit of happiness” is counted as a true right, and yet rights are no more self-evident than are souls. Therefore, citizens are left with being proscribed tolerance.
(Manufacturing the Goods Life) Getting to where we are now as a culture that endlessly consumes, goes far back to the people’s idea of how to treat God’s creation, the greediness of the Catholic church’s clergy and the idea that material prosperity was a sign of God’s favour. Wars over religion were expensive and onerous and by taking the Dutch Republic’s example of favouring a common interest in economic prosperity over a common interest in religion, life seemed better. Suddenly it became a good thing to want good things for one’s family and everyone could agree that being comfortable was a source of happiness, even if many wars have been waged over the fight for material goods. An increasingly undeniable consequence of capitalism and consumerism has been the destruction of the environment and the consequences of the disruption caused to the natural world.
(Secularizing Knowledge) Finally, effects of the Reformation can also be found in universities where specialization, while good, is also conducted in isolation without an idea of “knowledge as a whole,” [p 301] or how things are connected and related to each other. Theology was put aside as were other forms of knowledge that had been accepted prior to the Reformation. Universities favoured secular humanism and just the right amount of skepticism, to “relativize […] religious views” [p 359] and still allow for toleration.
In the end, while Luther set out to fix the problems in the Catholic church, he could not adjust the foundation in a way that made sense to everyone. Instead, his effort had the unintended consequence of causing a breach where a whole diversity of claims about truth rushed forth and spread and splintered.
A few quotes
From Chapter 2 “Relativizing Doctrines”
A rejection of the church's authority and many of its teachings is precisely what happened in the Reformation. All Protestant reformers came to believe that the established church was no longer the church established by Jesus. So they spurned many truth claims of the faith as embodied in the Roman church. Their repudiation was not based primarily on the church's rampant abuses, the sinfulness of many of its members, or entrenched obstacles to reform. All of these had been obvious to conscientious clerical reformers and other open-eyed Christians for well over a century. The Reformation's upshot was rather that Roman Catholicism, even at its best, was a perverted form even if all its members had been self-consciously following all the Roman church's teachings and had been enacting all its permitted practices. Institutional abuses and immorality were seen as symptomatic signs of a flawed foundation, namely false and dangerous doctrines - that is, mistaken truth claims. The established church itself was teaching errors and lies as if they were truth. This was the problem that had to be fixed. And because the church had pressed into every nook and cranny of politics, social life, economic activity, and culture - in myriad ways, according to Protestant reformers, distorting them all - it looked like the apocalypse was nigh. [p 86]
From Chapter 3 “Controlling the Churches”:
With supreme irony and as a result of understandable pragmatic decisions, it repudiated Jesus's uncompromising, anti-subjectivist, anti-individualist commands precisely because disagreement about them had proven so costly in the Reformation era and in the enduring confessional antagonisms it left in its wake. Doubly ironically, however, by pointing the way to the emancipation of politics from any and all religious institutions, the American founders unwittingly laid the groundwork for the potential erosion of the church-nurtured, virtuous behaviors of the nation's citizens, and so for the eventual endangerment of the nation's own public, political well-being that depended on citizens who exhibited certain behaviors rather than others. Controlling the churches by disestablishing them freed not only political institutions from churches but also established the institutional framework for the eventual liberation of society from religion. It left public culture, political life, economic activity, and social relationships dependent on the individual behaviors that informed them, whatever those behaviors happened to be. [p 172]
From Chapter 4 “Subjectivizing Morality”:
As MacIntyre notes, the widespread default in Western societies at large is emotivism, an ethics of subjective, feelings-based, personal preference, which only exacerbates the unresolved and irresolvable disagreements. The de facto guideline for the living of human life in the Western world today seems simply to be "whatever makes you happy" - "so long as you're not hurting anyone else" - in which the criteria for happiness, too, are self-determined, self-reported, and therefore immune to critique, and in which the meaning of "hurting anyone else" is assumed to be self-evident, unproblematic, or both. Because there is no shared framework within which such disagreements might rationally be debated and perhaps overcome, and yet life goes on, moral disagreements are translated socially into political contestation within an emotivist culture - one that is closely related to if not largely identical with the individualistic "therapeutic culture" diagnosed by Philip Rieff. Protests, the exertion of power, and manipulation, whether overt or disguised, displace rational moral discourse, as has become ever more apparent, for example, in American public life and the media in recent decades. Everything becomes "political" because once morality has been subjectivized no arguments can succeed, since there is no shared set of assumptions from which they can proceed. [p 182]
From the conclusion:
Yet the same institutional arrangements that solved the central problem posed by the failure of confessional Europe created the conditions for the failure of Western modernity itself, which is now well under way in different respects. In order to see this, we have not only consider simply and narrowly the problems that modern liberalism solved, but also what its institutional arrangements have facilitated in combination with other historical developments. A centrally important, paradoxical characteristic of modern liberalism is that it does not prescribe what citizens should believe, how they should live, or what they should care about, but it nonetheless depends for the social cohesion and political vitality of the regimes it informs on the voluntary acceptance of widely shared beliefs, values, and priorities that motivate people's actions. Otherwise liberal states have to become more legalistic and coercive in order to insure stability and security. In the West, many of those basic beliefs, values, and priorities - including self-discipline, self-denial, self-denial, self-sacrifice, ethical responsibility for others, duty to one's community, commitment to one's spouse and children - derive most influentially in the modern Western world from Christianity and were shared across confessional lives in early modern Europe. Advanced secularization, precipitated partly by the capitalism and consumerism encouraged by liberal states, has considerably eroded them in the past several decades and thus placed increasing pressures on public life through the social fragmentation and political apathy of increasing numbers of citizens who exercise their rights to live for themselves and to ignore politics. This is one way in which modernity's failure is under way, a symptom of which is the constant stream of (thus far, ineffectual) proposals about how to reinvigorate democracy, restore public civility, get citizens to care about politics and so forth. [pp 375-6]
The quotes above are excerpted with fair use in mind… I might be wrong though, and I’m happy to comply should copyright be infringed here.
Links
This is a video on Youtube in which Gregory introduces his book to a university audience at Notre Dame.
This is a podcast episode in which Gregory discusses academia and history more generally.