The Reformation: A History
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Viking Press, 792 pages, $34.95

In his new history of the Reformation, Diarmaid MacCulloch insists that what divided the Western Church in the 16th century was not Church corruption, monarchs greedy for Church property, or the newly discovered learning of the humanists but “a new statement of Augustine’s ideas on salvation.” Theology caused the Reformation.

This is not a new thesis. Geoffrey Elton, MacCulloch’s doctoral adviser at Cambridge, advanced it in Europe from Renaissance to Reformation (1963), declaring that “Luther did not just quarrel with the Church because he thought it diseased and corrupt: he thought it unchristian and devilish.” MacCulloch is equally adamant that “social or political history cannot do without theology in understanding the sixteenth century” and warns that “there is…much description of…abstract thought in my account of the Reformation.” To judge the book, we need to look at his descriptions of the “abstract thought” that exercised the reformers.

MacCulloch stresses how influential Augustine’s ideas about original sin were on Luther but neglects to show how Luther distorted them by considering them outside Augustine’s understanding of the authority of the Church. Even if we concede that Augustine’s understanding of original sin was unduly pessimistic, the fact remains that it led him to embrace the profoundly optimistic promise of sanctifying grace. It did not lead him to argue that our only remedy for sin is abject reliance on God’s mercy. His arguments against Pelagius, the British monk who denied original sin, do not validate Luther. There is nothing Lutheran about Augustine’s respect for works, for penance, for his understanding of what he refers to in the Confessions as the relation between “the justice which justifies and the justice created by justification.” Nevertheless, readers unfamiliar with Augustine cannot be blamed if they come away from MacCulloch’s account convinced that Augustine, not Luther, was the Reformation’s true ringleader. 

About Luther’s notions of justification by faith alone, MacCulloch asks the obvious question: If good works are worthless in the sight of God and of no consequence whether we go to heaven or hell, why should we bother being good? His answer betrays the indefensibility of Luther’s position. “Some might say there was no point in morality at all—this was the problem of ‘antinomianism,’ which continued to haunt the Protestant Reformation. Luther, however, refused to see it as a problem. His willingness to embrace opposites, to make a joyous art form of paradox, was here seen at its most effective. The freedom of a Christian consists in the knowledge that no commandments can be kept properly, but God does not condemn us for that—indeed he has come to die in anguish to save our anguish.” The point of the atonement, then, was not so much to expiate as to perpetuate sin. This typifies MacCulloch’s treatment of the incoherence rife in Protestant thinking.

Nevertheless, MacCulloch’s sympathy for the ideas of the reformers is welcome. Recognition of the one true Faith can only be strengthened by acquaintance with the varieties of error. It is difficult imagining any Catholic historian sifting through the ideas of Hus or Zwingli or Bullinger or Calvin with anything like MacCulloch’s dogged patience. What spoils the book is that he shows no comparable sympathy for purgatory or the Real Presence or any of the other pillars of orthodoxy, which Luther and his cohorts worked so assiduously to topple. In his discussion of the indulgences that led Luther to affix his 95 theses to Wittenberg’s church door in 1517, MacCulloch speaks of purgatory as “a spiritual trade,” which “gave people a sense that they had some control over death….” Rather than considering the theological basis of the doctrine, MacCulloch merely reiterates Luther’s claim that when the faithful pray for the dead they are investing not “in an easier passage to salvation” but “clerical confidence tricks.”

Here is the same contempt for works of faith that can be found in MacCulloch’s fellow Reformation historian, Patrick Collinson, who has written, “When the faithful were told that the heavy investment of their time and money in religious works designed to produce salvation was so much wasted effort perhaps there was relief like that experienced by the jogger who is told that his regular morning exercise is in fact bad for his health.” Both these learned men are reminiscent of the Americans Oscar Wilde met on his lecture tours: They know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Putting aside its flaws, there are admirable things in the book. Although MacCulloch claims to be most interested in theology, it is when his subject is more strictly political that he excels. His account of why Protestantism took popular hold in Scotland and not in Ireland is incisive. He is witty about how “England judiciously murdered more Roman Catholics than any other country in Europe, which puts English pride in national tolerance in an interesting perspective.” He is good at showing how the Italians were so successful at enforcing the Index’s ban on the Bible that between 1567 and 1773 there was not a single Italian-language edition of the book printed anywhere in the Italian peninsula. He shows grudging respect for Carlo Borromeo and the Counter Reformation, computing that at Borromeo’s death in 1584 in his Milan diocese alone, 40,000 students were studying under 3,000 teachers at 740 schools.

Although MacCulloch errs wildly in claiming that the American Catholic Church has now “enrolled as a subset of the American Protestant scene”—a claim exhibiting equal ignorance of the nature of American Catholicism and American Protestantism—he is good at showing how Protestantism took root in America. Ironically, the first Bible printed in the country was in the Algonquin dialect, despite the fact that unlike their Spanish and French counterparts, English settlers rarely bothered to convert the natives: They were too preoccupied with the imminence of the Last Days. John Eliot, the heroic translator of the Algonquin Bible, was an exception. 

A few concluding cavils: MacCulloch devotes a dozen pages to sodomy and two to St. Thomas More; he ignores the truly tragic effects of Thomas Cromwell’s destruction of the monasteries, about which William Cobbett wrote with such eloquent indignation; and in his bibliography he cites none of Christopher Haigh’s books, which, by any measure, merit inclusion.

The Reformation: A History is not the balanced survey for which there is still a crying need, but it is an ambitious, engaging, contentious book that Catholic readers will enjoy disliking.