| Unit
Objectives |
The Reformation, like the Renaissance,
was born in the fold of little states. Indeed, without them, it could
not have survived, nor could it have survived without the rivalry of
Spain and France. Like the humanists, the Reformers were opposed to the
cloister and were thoroughly committed to life in the world. The culture
roughly described as humanist, and the Reformation, arose as papal
vitality ebbed. Both movements were movements of emancipation, drawing
their inspiration and their legitimacy from an earlier period. In their
recasting of values, and their attempt to shape new views of man, the
humanists and Reformers were akin, but their visions of life and of
human capacity and their sources of authority were quite different.
The Reformers were guided by early Christian authority rather than pagan
classics. They were less Greek and Roman than Hebrew. While the
humanists satirized the abuses of the Church, the Reformers denounced
them; the one group tolerated the papacy and concentrated its scorn on
superstitions and on the medieval religious orders; the other was
alienated by the practice and pretension of the Renaissance papacy. It
was not simply that Renaissance popes had been derelict in their duty to
cure souls, or that they were politically minded and materialistic, and
often guilty of gross nepotism and flagrant immorality. What mattered
was the abuse of the spiritual office of the Pope. And the abuse rested
on claims that became the focus of the intellectual and theological
grievances of the Reformers. By and large the humanists had assumed that
they knew the way to salvation and devoted themselves to enriching the
possibilities of life, while the Reformers were seeking new avenues of
assurance.
Behind this quest lay a deep soul-sickness or, perhaps, sensitivity that
had continued in Northern Europe alongside the Renaissance. It existed
in the country rather than in the gay and elegant court and it shook the
middle and lower orders more than the aristocracy.
A sense of doom had lingered long after the Plague. Even during the
Plague the reaction in the North had been more hysterical and ghoulish
than in the South. Dancing frenzies and flagellations were less frequent
in Italy. And one is tempted to attribute this to climate. Throughout
the 15th century the North was preoccupied with death, judgment, and
hell fire, and an abiding pessimism about man's fate runs through its
prose and poetry. A peculiarly macabre dance fashion cropped up,
performed by men with skeletons. The dance was intended to remind
watchers of their mortality and their equality before the relentless
swathe of time. Woodcuts popularized the steps and stages of it.
Also, a spate of the early printed pamphlets dealt with the art of
dying. In art, morbid undertones took on a bizarre realism. Van Eyck's The
Last Judgment portrayed the subterranean horror to which the evil
were to be committed. Bosch's strange sermons in paint are inhabited by
wild, nightmarish creatures. Even Durer, the realist, flanks his
righteous Christian knight on his way to a "city on a hill"
with a figure of death holding an hourglass, and a monstrous devil--half
wolf, half pig. Similarly, Schöngauer's St. Anthony Tormented by
Demons crawls with hobgoblins and foul friends. Luther believed
deeply in the reality and power of Satan and his demons.
As somber as the Northern climate may be, it was also the proximity to
death and the frequency of it that kept morbid pessimism alive. In
France and Burgundy, for instance, the desolation of the Hundred Years
War was followed by decimation between rival factions, not to mention
recurrences of the Plague. So, from the time of the Plague, through
wars, famines, and civil wars, there had been no respite from the threat
of death and no guarantee against the onset of disaster.
War during this era will manifest
itself in four major conflicts:
~ the Spanish Armada
~ the Dutch Revolt against the Spanish Habsburgs
~ the French War of the Three Henrys
~ the Thirty Years' War.
While religion plays a pivotal role in
each conflict, religion is often couched in political terms. The
outcomes will change the face of Europe permanently!
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