Abstract
If the new religious conceptions in Italy found their origin and foundation in a new philosophical view of man in relation to that of the Classics, a similar type of religious revolution, an Umwertung aller Werte, emanated in Europe-trans-montes from a religious revival, a direct reaction against the existing religious practices. This is not meant in the way in which it was customary, not so long ago, to explain the protestant Reformation as a curative reaction to the abuses in the catholic Church. That is too negative or too simple: the Reformation — both the minor and the major — was an important step forward on the long path covered from the religion of primitive man towards present views, a phase in the gradual emancipation of man, thanks to reason, the guiding force of human thought and action.
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References
I am speaking in rather great detail about it here, because the Reformation is all too often viewed merely as a dispute concerning dogmas and, on the other hand, the conditions in the Church at that time are considered as “popular belief,” while the “real doctrine” of the Church should be able to be found with the theologians, who fitted the observances into a philosophical system. What was new in the 16th century was close to what theologians had often taught, but a long way from what was held before laymen as the truth or their duty.
R. R. Post, Kerkelijke verhoudingen in Nederland voor de Reformatiez van ± 1500 tot ± 1580 (1954): 36 (Post is professor at the Catholic University of Nimegue); — Philip Hughes, The Reformation in England, I (1951): 70, 83.
Post, op. cit.: 473.
Op. cit.: 365.
M. Meertens, De Godsvrucht in de Nederlanden (1930), II: 83.
G. Kalff, Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Letterkunde in de 16e eeuw (1889), I: 87; — a Chamber of Rhetoric is what in England is called a town guild organizing dramatic representations (”pageants”), cf. the Introduction to the edition of Everyman quoted, note 1, p. 116.
I am following here the excellent treatment of Prof. R. R. Post concerning conditions in the Northern Netherlands in the 16th century; conditions were doubtless the same elsewhere on the Continent; as for England cf. John Henry De Groot, The Shakespeares and “the old Faith” (1947): 112-123.
Hermann Waldermayer, Die Entstehung der evangelischen Gottesdienstordnungen Süddeutschlands im Zeitalter der Reformation (1916): 3 ff.
Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2 II s. v. Fegfeuer, III: 273, V: 73.
According to Philip Hughes (op. cit., I: 91) all authors in the 16th century agree “that the Mass is not a sacrifice that produces the redemption wrought only and for all on Calvary, but a sacrifice that applies to us the fruits of that redeeming act.”
H. Maynard Smith, Pre-Reformation England (1958): 93.
hoc. cit.: 91.
hoc. cit.: 114; — Post, op. cit.: 446 ff.
Post, op. cit.: 419.
Quoted: H. Maynard Smith, op. cit.: 127.
In the Dutch play this person is called “die Deucht,” i.e. “Virtue”; from line 529, it seems that the English translator is thinking, not of virtue in general, but of “good works.”
This as opposed to the view of Rudolf Stadelmann, who considers Wessel and many of the thinkers related to him as a withering second blossoming of the Middle Ages, after which only with Luther a new spring should begin ( Vom Geist des ausgehenden Mittelalters, passim).
M. van Rhijn, Studien over Wessel Gansfort en zijin tijd (1933,) this is in some parts a correction and supplement to his greater work: Wessel Gansfort (1917): 54, 57.
Vom Geist: 140.
Stadelmann, op. cit.: 139, 140.
regnum dei inter vos est adeo ut, si velitis, … regnare possitis; est enim inter vos memoria fecunda si colatur, est intelligentia illustris si audiatur, est voluntas sancta si ea custodiatur (quoted from Scientia tnedica, in Stadelmann, op. cit.: 140).
duplex est sacerdotium, unum ordinis et sacramentale, alterum naturae rationalis et commune omnibus; secundum sine primo satis est (loc. cit.: 211).
Van Rhijn, op. cit.: 46.
Loc. cit.: 41; — Stadelmann, op. cit.: 77.
Stadelmann, op. cit.: 129.
Vaii Rhijn, op. cit.: 38, 48; — Willy Andreas, Deutschland vor der Reformation, Eine Zeitenwende, 4 (1943): 141.
Andreas, op. cit.: 141 ff.; — W. Pijper calls Puper “a forerunner of the Reformation” in many respects (Bibliotheca neerl. reformatoria, VI, Introduction to a work by Gnapheus, who will be mentioned later).
Andreas, op. cit.: 151-153.
Hans Baron, “Zur Frage des Ursprungs des deutschen Humanismus und seiner religiösen Reformbestrebungen”: Historische Zeitschrift, 132, (1925): 430.
Gerhard Ritter, “Die geschichtliche Bedeutung des Deutschen Humanismus”: Hist. Zeitschr., 127. (1923): 408-412.
Wir wollen ja doch auch erwerben, Daß uns Gott läßt in Gnaden sterben, Wie er, obgleich er Tag und Nacht Liegt auf den Knien, betet und wacht, Er will nur fasten und Zellen bauen, Wagt weder Gott noch der Welt zu trauen — Gott hat uns darum nicht geschaffen, Daß wir Mönche werden oder Pfaffen. cf. Dilthey, Weltanschauung und Analyse; Gesamm. Schrifte, II: 51. 4 Loc. cit.
Die Einsicht, daß die christliche Kultur des Mittelalters mit ihrem religiösen Dualismus von Diesseits und Jenseits, von Sünde und Erlösung letzlich nicht die einzig wertvolle, die schlechthin allgemein gültige Kultur der Menschheit sei, sondern nur eine unter mehreren möglichen. Daß es eine Bildung des Menschen auch außerhalb des herkömmlichen kirchlichen Bildungsbegriffes gebe … in jedem Falle eine Bildung, die ihre eigenen Wert in sich trägt, auch unabhänglich von solchem (kirchlichen) Oberziel. (Ritter, “Die geschichtliche Bedeutung”: 425)
Sie lebt in der Empfindung und Erfahrung der sittlichen Natur und Bestimmung des Menschen.
Das ganze große Heilsdrama mit seinen vielen Veranstaltungen hatte für den, der nicht mehr religiös konkret zu denken verstand, seinen Reiz verloren. (Kühn, Toleranz und Offenbarung: 25 f.)
Wallace A. Fergusson, “Renaissance Tendencies in Erasmus”: Journal of the History of Ideas, XV (1954): 502.
Si leo faciem tibi attribueret non nisi leoninam iudicaret et bos bovinam et aquila aquilinam. ? domine, quam admirabilis est faciès tua: quam si iuvenis concipere vellet, iuvenilem fingeret et vir virilem et senex senilem (quoted: Stadelmann, op. cit.: 53).
But not without doubting whether he is competent, lacking in faith as he is: while reading the mass he sometimes feels like a “magician”: “trahor ad aras veluti victima immolanda” (I drag myself to the altar like an animal, to be sacrificed): from a letter, dated 1514: Fritz Haibauer, Mutianus Rufus und seine geistesgeschichtliche Stellung (1929): 107.
Est unus deus et una dea, sed sunt multa uti numina ita et nomina: Jupiter, Sol, … Moses, Christus, … Tellus, Maria … Quam Iovem nomino, Christum in-telligo et verum Deum (quoted: Dilthey, op. cit.: 47).
Wolfgang Stammler, Von der Mystik zum Barock, 1400-1600 (1927): 37.
Ritter, op. cit.: 447.
Stammler, op. cit.: 89.
Dilthey, op. cit.: 53, 45; — Stammler, op. cit.: 130.
Augustin Renaudet, Préréforme et Humanisme à Paris pendant les premières guerres d’Italie, 1494-1517, 2 (1953): 371.
P. Imbart de la Tour, Les origines de la Réforme en France, II. L’église catholique, la crise et la renaissance (2m? édition, 1946): 424-431, 437; — Léontine Zanta, La Renaissance du Stoïcisme au i6me siècle (1914): 83.
J. Huizinga, Erasmus (1924): 66.
The quoted words are borrowed from Renaudet, op. cit.: 426 ff.
Imbart de la Tour, op. cit.: 569.
Quotation from a sermon on Rom. 7, 24 in: John H. Lupton, A Life of John Colet 2 (1909): 81.
Lupton, op. cit.: 76.
Raymond Marcel, “Les découvertes d’Erasme en Angleterre”: Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, Melanges Renaudet, XIV (1952): 116.
Renaudet, Préréforme: 386.
F. Seebohm, The Oxford Reformers, John Colet, Erasmus, Th. More, Being a History of their Fellow Work 3 (1887): 12.
Seebohm, op. cit.: 16.
Seebohm, op. cit.: 39, 41, 45, 73.
Loc. cit.: 207.
Lupton, op. cit.: 76; — I can fully agree with Eugen F. Rice, “’John Colet and the Annihilation of the Natural:” Harvard Theological Review, vol. XLV(1952): 141-163, when he demonstrates that Colet must be placed opposite the “Humanists,” since he sees such an absolute contrast between “nature” and “grace” and sets the “natural person” and “natural reason” against the believer who is pardoned by Christ and “wisdom” which is conferred by grace, It is certain that Colet, with the mediaeval christian writers, continued to be convinced that there was no true wisdom except through grace conferred in Christianity and from the christian Revelation; on many occasions he can abominate all pre-christian philosophers as incapable of “wisdom” (sapientia) and even reading them can be advised against. But this does not alter the fact that on other occasions Colet praises them as guides on the path to virtue and also often discovers a spark of “wisdom” in them. For us, it is not so much a question of the contrast of “nature” and “grace,” as of the manner in which the grace comes to man; in this respect indeed Colet was more restrictive than the humanists: “grace” is reserved for those who are selected in Christianity and those who believe in Christ, but compared with orthodox Catholicism Colet considered it to come through and from the Revelation and through Christ’s coining, not through the Church and not through the sacrament.
Paul Meissner, England im Zeitalter von Humanismus, Renaissance und Reformation (1952): 80, 234.
Seebohm, op. cit.: 68, 105 (italics are mine).
Formulations borrowed from Seebohm, op. cit.: 65, 66, 60.
Maynard Smith, op. cit.: 452.
Op. cit.: 70-73.
This formula we will also find with Erasmus (see p. 162).
Quotation in: Seebohm, op. cit.: 88.
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© 1961 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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van Gelder, H.A.E. (1961). Orthodox Catholicism and its Early Opponents. In: The Two Reformations in the 16th Century. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9564-5_4
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