Welcome back to this reflection on the fall of paradise, the last reflection of the first half of my podcast, Paradise and Utopia: Reflections on the Rise and Fall of Christendom. In the first episode, I talked about the town of Munster in 16th-century Germany when leaders of that town—radical Anabaptist Protestants—seized control of it and proclaimed the existence of a New Jerusalem. In this episode, I would like to turn to the broader experience or characteristics of Western Christendom under the Protestant movement of the 16th century.

So what I’d like to do right off the bat, then, is to remind my audience of the working definition I’m using for Christendom, and that is: a civilization with a supporting culture that directs its members toward the transformation of the world. In early Christendom—that was covered in the first ten reflections of this podcast—I emphasized that the transformation of the world as it was understood was always to bring this world into communion with God through the experience of the sacramental life of the Church, the influence of traditional Christianity. That communion with God was understood especially as an experience of paradise, an experience of the kingdom of heaven, so that Christendom defined that way, what might be called paradisaical Christendom, was a Christendom in which the civilization and its supporting culture directed its members toward the kingdom of heaven.

Now in the second half of what I’ve done so far, I’ve shown that, since the Great Schism, Western Christendom took a new course. This new course was characterized by what I called the New Christendom of the Middle Ages, and it was exactly that New Christendom which was the context for the anthropological crisis of late medieval Western Christendom that produced the Protestant Reformation to begin with. All of this was covered in reflection 19, “The Crisis of Western Christendom.”

Now in reflection 20, “The Fall of Paradise,” I return to the broad characteristics of Christendom as they’ve existed over this long, long period of time. I want to start off by emphasizing that within Western Christendom, beginning in the 16th century with the Protestant Reformation, there was quite a bit of continuity with early patterns of this civilization and its supporting culture. Those patterns of continuity were especially noteworthy in those parts of Western Christendom which remained Roman Catholic. As I noted in the previous episode, much of Europe, of course, remains Roman Catholic beyond the Protestant Reformation and all the way to the present, at least nominally. Here of course we’re talking about Italy, Spain, Portugal, most of France; we’re talking about Austria and central Germany—Bavaria, for instance—and we’re also talking about other areas of Europe, such as Poland or Ireland. These all remained Roman Catholic, and though Protestantism made an impact here, as it did in Protestant lands, that impact of course was minimal.

So the character of Christendom, of this civilization and culture, remained largely what it had been before the Protestant Reformation. There were some exceptions to this, but the important Council of Trent, which was organized by the Roman Catholic Church and met between 1545 and 1563, right when the Protestant Reformation was, as it were, at its height, the Council of Trent kind of re-established the principles of Roman Catholicism and helped establish therefore the form of Christendom that appeared in those lands I’ve now mentioned.

One very significant point of confirmation at the Council of Trent was the importance of and continued role, even centrality of, the Latin Mass and the sacramental life that was associated with it. Sacraments and liturgical life remained unbroken in the history of Roman Catholic Christendom after the Protestant Reformation.

In other lands of Western Christendom that did become Protestant, there was also continuity insofar as some of the Protestant movements, though breaking from Rome and introducing very substantial changes in the character of Christianity, nevertheless maintained some continuity, sometimes a lot of it, with the past. Here I am thinking especially of the case of Lutheranism and Anglicanism, Lutheranism mainly in Germany, although it spread also to areas like Scandinavia, and Anglicanism, centered of course upon the Church of England.

The Reformation in those lands was, from a Roman Catholic point of view, quite radical and disruptive, probably the same from the point of view of the leaders of those movements. But looked at more broadly and from historical hindsight, there was quite a bit of continuity in the Church life that Luther and his followers, such as Philip Melanchthon, or Melanchthon sometimes pronounced, oversaw in Germany, or in England, where Thomas Cranmer, for instance, who composed the Book of Common Prayer and other Anglican theologians and Church leaders oversaw the life of Christianity. In those lands, the liturgy continued in some of its earlier forms. Sacramental life maintained some of its earlier forms and conceptions. So the character of the Reformation there was much more moderate, you might say, than in some of the other lands of Europe, of Western Europe.

My point here is simply that, when talking about Protestant Christianity and the Reformation of Western Christendom, we should be aware that this was not necessarily a complete revolution throughout the West. It was not so, but in certain lands it was quite noteworthy, quite radical; as we saw last time, it was actually quite literally revolutionary in the case of Munster.

So with that in mind, let’s return, then, to one of the key elements in Christendom that we’ve explored, and that is what I called, very early on, as a matter of fact, in the very first reflection, reflection one, and that was the principle that I called the transformational imperative, the transformational imperative that Christendom always had, or more specifically, more immediately, that traditional Christianity always had. The transformation of the world, the cosmos, was something traditional Christianity always proclaimed, from Pentecost forward. If anyone wants to review the points I made about this, reflection number one would be the place to go in this podcast.

Traditional Christianity always proclaimed—it’s found especially in the Gospel of St. John—that the Incarnation of God has completely changed the character and value of this world, of this cosmos. The result of this cosmology of traditional Christianity was that man, especially man joined into the sacramental community of the Church, that the human being now experiences paradise in this world and that this world has been transformed by the presence of God. So much of the podcast is centered upon this principle that I call the transformational imperative.

Well, this principle was largely elaborated and conceived and realized in early times through the liturgy and liturgical acts that were sacramental in character, so obviously the Eucharist was at the center of all of this, baptism played a role in initiating one into the experience of all of this, but things like marriage also served to transform and sanctify the world. I talked about even how the liturgical arts played their role in this transformation of the cosmos.

That was the case especially in early Christianity, early Christendom, and it continued to be the case in Eastern Christendom, beyond the Great Schism, found especially in movements like the hesychastic movement of the 14th century, associated with St. Gregory Palamas, [and] found also in Russia as late as the 16th century, despite the character of Ivan the Terrible and his state. Despite many other disasters and abominations even that occurred in Muscovite Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church continued to manifest liturgically this strong experience, conviction about the incarnate presence of God in this world, the experience of paradise.

In the West as we’ve seen in many reflections since the Great Schism, since reflection number 11, in the West we’ve seen, however, that in addition to a liturgical experience of paradise, there have been other forms that this transformational imperative have taken, much more noteworthy than in the East. These forms include, in the Roman Catholic West, the papal reformation, the papal reformation of the eleventh century, which sought to transform so much of the character of Western Christendom under the influence, the agency of, through the instrument of the office of the Pope of Rome, with very significant, long-term consequences, the most important of which was the actual division from Eastern Christendom in the Great Schism of 1054.

Also in the Roman Catholic West was the transformational process known as the mendicant reformation, to talk of it that way. Historians don’t often use that phrase as much as they do, for instance, use papal reformation, but in the 14th and 15th centuries, the period that I discussed in reflection 19, there was a strong movement of reform in the Western Church, in the Roman Catholic Church, reform taking the form of exhortation and missions, by mendicant monks, especially Franciscans, going out into the world, leaving monasteries behind, and trying to transform society, especially through a message that was penitential in character. Listeners may recall the figure of the Franciscan monk, Bernardino of Siena, and his very strong, fire-and-brimstone-like sermons that he preached in town squares during the early 15th century.

So the reformation, then, of Western Christendom, had already been something that was occasionally undertaken by Church leaders. This is all background, then, to the 16th century Reformation of Protestants, who really in many ways follow a continuity with Roman Catholic patterns of transforming the world. Therefore the Reformation Project, to call it that, of Protestantism, was really something that had its roots not in any other experience than in the experience of the New Christendom of the Roman Catholic Middle Ages.

Let me turn a little bit of attention now to the goals of the Reformation Project of those Protestants, whether they be Luther or Calvin or the Anabaptists. Generally speaking,  Protestants had the central goal of reestablishing, as they thought of it, true Christianity, the Christianity of the Apostolic Age, which was largely something they imagined, though they had at their disposal the New Testament, which was a record—a limited record, for sure, but a record—of apostolic Christianity.

This movement, the Protestant movement, sought to reestablish what it considered to be true Christianity and did so by protesting—right, that’s where it gets its name: the Protestant Reformation is a reformation of protest—the untruth that they claimed to find in the contemporary Church life of the late Middle Ages. This untruth was centered for them was centered on the institution of the papacy. It was also centered on the penitential system of piety that characterized Roman Catholicism and which I explored repeatedly in recent reflections, but especially reflection 19, “The Crisis of Western Christendom.”

Finally, they protested what they considered to be incorrect worship, a form of worship that they considered in many cases nothing short of idolatry. All of these and other features of Roman Catholicism, circa 1500, were at the center of their protest and attack.

Now, the effects of this Protestant movement were very significant and would have a long-term impact on the character and historical development of Western Christendom. I would like to turn now to some of these effects. First of all, one of the effects of the Protestant Reformation in Western Christendom was to establish, in quite a virtuous way, an exacting moral and faith expectation among the members of Christendom—among all members of Christendom. One of the most remarkable and admirable aspects of the Protestant Reformation was they way its leaders appealed to common people and raised them up as much as was possible to a heightened sense of their membership in the Church, of their identity as Christians, in forming them and cultivating in them strong commitments to the Christian faith. This was really a remarkable feature of Protestantism, and anyone, not only Protestants, but Roman Catholics and Orthodox, can admire the long-term example of Protestant Christianity in stirring up and emphasizing conscious participation in the Christian life by Protestant Christians.

So this was one of the main effects of the Protestant Reformation. Interestingly, it was of course contrasted with Protestants with the former sense that only monks in reclusive communities of monasteries were the ones in Christendom were the most committed, most informed, most committed Christians. The idea here was to reject totally monasticism and transfer all of the high expectations placed on monks in former centuries now to the entire corpus [Christianum], the entire body or corpus of the Christian Church, the Christendom of the West. So that’s very impressive.

But by doing this, in order to do this, a certain changed attitude toward the world and the place of the sacraments in bringing the world into communion with God was necessary, or at least appeared to be necessary, by Protestants, within their Western, predominantly Roman Catholic and late medieval historical context. How so? Well, the result of the effort to advance the Protestant Reformation was that now, instead of a sacramental kind of plane in which righteousness was conceived or defined, now there was a moral plane that was placed instead of it. We see a transition from a [sacramental] plane to a [moral] one in situating or defining righteousness within the larger Protestant movement.

The traditional standard of righteousness for Christianity, traditional Christianity, was repentance, and the morally unworthy participation of the believer in sacramental union with God. Repentance was seen as bringing one into a condition of righteousness, not any moral achievement, although traditional Christianity, through documents and traditions around the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere, always called Christians to the highest possible level of moral behavior. That was found in the Sermon on the Mount: “Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,” Jesus commands his disciples. There was never any ambiguity; there was never any compromise in the absolutely highest, in fact, divine standard of human behavior and human experience within traditional Christianity.

However, the understanding of righteousness was much more liturgically framed within traditional Christianity. Through repentance and through participation, though morally unworthy of it, in sacramental communion with God, the Christian found the experience of righteousness. The tendency, after the Great Schism in the Middle Ages in the West, however, began to be directed more from this sacramental understanding to one that was more and more emphasizing morality, moral actions, especially good works, as they were called, in a system of sacramental penances and ultimately indulgences, something we’ve talked about, something I’ve talked about especially in the previous reflection. The good works system of late medieval Roman Catholicism had emphasized sacramental penances and indulgences for obtaining or establishing one’s righteousness before God, this especially under the influence of the doctrine called purgatory, which I discussed extensively in an earlier reflection.

Now there’s more of an emphasis of a moral plane, in which one’s righteousness is established, than a sacramental one. However—and I emphasize this point very, very strongly—it remained sacramental and liturgically worked out. Penances always had a sacramental basis within Roman Catholic piety: the confessional and so forth, going to monasteries, on pilgrimages, going to shrines on pilgrimages, going to Rome on pilgrimages, going to the relics of saints on pilgrimages. These were actions that had a liturgical setting, a liturgical kind of basis, but they were moral actions, especially when they were integrated into a system that emphasized penances—formal, legal, legally defined penances—and indulgences.

This tendency for a more moral experience rather than liturgical experience of righteousness became characteristic of medieval, Western piety. Now the Protestant instinct to reject such practices, penitential good works, resulted—and we know well enough Luther launched the Protestant Reformation as an act of rebelling against, rejecting, the practice of indulgences, and Luther, of course, protested the experience he described as being caught up in a system of penances that he could never possibly emerge from with righteousness. This whole Protestant instinct was to reject penitential good works and instead emphasize faith alone, not good works, but faith alone as the standard of righteousness. Of course, Luther famously introduced the principle [of] faith alone; “man is saved by faith alone,” he proclaimed, “and not by works.” This is a distortion of what Paul says in his epistles like Galatians and Romans, when he says, “Man is saved by faith”—but he doesn’t say alone—“and not by works of the law.”

So I’ve talked a little bit about that already and don’t need to really spend more time, I think, reflecting on the faith alone principle that Luther worked out. All I have to say right here is that, by emphasizing faith alone, Luther and Protestants after him—and all Protestants follow Luther’s principle of faith alone—began more and more to reject a sacramental basis for man’s experience of righteousness. What we have, then, in the new faith morality of Protestantism was a continued emphasis upon morality, though not a morality of actual actions, of works, good works or otherwise, but a morality of faith, that the believer was righteous according to his faith, and only, really, according to his faith. This ironically kept, retained, Protestant righteousness on that moral plane that had begun to emerge in the Middle Ages, but now without the sacramental and liturgical basis of it. So the sacramental relationship to the world, to the cosmos, was jettisoned, largely, by the Protestant movement, as it emphasized faith alone and saw righteousness as being only something related to faith and works.

With all of that said, those effects of Protestantism, I can summarize here that what we see with the Protestant Reformation of Western Christendom is a tendency from, to put it this way, paradise to utopia, that a non-sacramental contempt of a spiritually transformed world produced a program of engineering a Christian commonwealth. It produced an effort to create a perfect society measured by Christian standards, one that was not rooted in the sacramental experience of paradise and one that more and more really represented an effort to create, often through rational engineering and planning, a perfect Christian society or commonwealth.

Here, as we turn from the sacramental experience of paradise to the largely social and moral experience of utopia, I would like to introduce the person that I will be speaking of in the next episode of this reflection, and that is John Calvin. Enter Calvinism. Calvinism, of course, became the largest and most influential movement in the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, and it did so because it, more than any other form of Protestantism, was able to achieve results in the transformation of the world, according to a Protestant standard, a Protestant non-liturgical, non-sacramental standard. We saw, of course, the failure of radical reformers to establish Christian commonwealths through violent revolution. Certainly the case of Munster is the best example of that failure. But that other tendency in Protestantism, the magisterial reformation that I spoke of last time, that often achieved much more lasting results. In fact, it achieved very lasting results because it found expression through legitimate power, legitimate influence and authority throughout Western Christendom. So a magisterial solution, then, to the challenge within Protestantism to transform the world, that solution was found in Calvin and his European followers.

What I’ll do here is just quote a book that speaks briefly here about the influence of Calvinism in creating a Christian commonwealth and its utopian tendencies. The book is a book by Michael Walzer. It’s called The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics. I’ll have reason to turn to this book again later in this reflection, but for now let me just close this episode by quoting Michael Walzer and his statement here. I’ll back up a little bit, because the whole paragraph I’d like to read to you here speaks about the case of the Anabaptists as well.

The reintegration of the old Adam into a disciplinary association—Church and state combined—would be the beginning, at least, of salvation. Calvin’s views took their final form while he was still a young man, and he promptly engaged in a sharp polemic against the Anabaptists, whose goal was not so much the reconstruction as the dissolution of the political world. Anticipating this goal, many of the Anabaptist saints refused to go to court or serve in the army or associate themselves in any way with the political order.

And in the most remarkable case, as we know, they seized control of a city, Munster, and proclaimed it to be the kingdom of heaven on earth. I’ll return to Walzer here.

They (the Anabaptists) sought an immediate blessedness and reunion with God. In his attack upon this sort of Christian radicalism, the future reformer of Geneva (Calvin) insisted that the mitigation of anxiety and alienation could only be achieved in a Christian commonwealth. He seemed to forego any suggestion of otherworldliness. Calvinism was thus anchored in this worldly endeavor. It appropriated worldly means and usages. Magistracy, legislation, warfare: the struggle for a new human community replacing the lost Eden was made a matter of concrete political activity.

Those are the words of Michael Walzer of the tendencies, then, at least within Calvinist Protestantism, foregoing any kind of sacramental experience of paradise or the kingdom of heaven, to establish on earth in political society the fullness of Christianity, a fullness which was now measured—righteousness measured—on a plane of morality rather than a plane of liturgical or sacramental life.

Join me next time when I explore Calvin and Calvinism and its contribution to the decline of paradise, the decline of the liturgical and sacramental experience of paradise, in Protestant Reformation Christendom.