The Protestant Reply Continued
"We held that civil authority is of divine right, as your own theologians did before us, since the social order needs a government that the public respects. We denied the international authority of the popes, because we saw that, instead of doing justice among all nations, the popes openly used their influence to pursue their own interests. The inability of your self-seeking popes to unite Europe for a crusade against the Ottoman Turks shows clearly that the failings of the papacy had broken the unity of Christendom long before the Reformation.
Although we regarded kingship as a divine right, we still supported the rise and growth of democracy in countries such as England, Scotland, Switzerland and America, while your priests in France, Italy and Spain bowed servilely before kings. It was our revolt against the domination of your Church that broke the spell of despotism and readied Europe to call every kind of mastery, religious or civil, to account.
You think we made the poor poorer, but that too was a passing phase. The same capitalist method that for a short time exploited the poor soon learned how to make ordinary people's lives more prosperous than before; and there is no doubt that the general standard of living in Protestant England, Germany and America is higher than in Catholic Italy, Spain and France.
If you are stronger today than yesterday, it is because of us. Did the Reformation not force you to reform the papal court, to keep your clergy from concubinage, and to seat devout men instead of unbelievers on the papal throne? To what do you think you owe the reputation for honesty and chastity of your clergy today? To the Council of Trent. But did you not owe the Council of Trent to the Reformation? Without this alarm, your Church would probably have gone on falling into unbelief, and the day would have come when your popes sat on the throne of a world that denied every truth and craved every pleasure. Even though we caused your Church to be rebuilt, the nations that have accepted your religion are more ignorant, and more skeptical about Christianity, than those that followed the Reformation; compare France with England.
We have learned to make peace between piety and freedom of thought; and for that reason it is the Protestant countries that have borne in their bosom the best fruit of science and philosophy. We hope to adapt our Christian faith to the progress of human knowledge; but how can a Church that has rejected all the sciences of the last four centuries bring itself nearer to this goal?"
(These comparisons of nations are the claims of the Protestant speaker in Durant's imagined debate, and are given here as such.)
The Humanist Objection
Here the humanists enter the debate and rouse both sides against themselves:
"It is both the glory and the weakness of Protestantism that it rests on thought, which is a factor forever changing; and conversely the strength of Catholicism lies in never having compromised with scientific theories, theories that, by the experience of history, have seldom outlived the century in which they were born. Catholicism seeks to meet the inward religious needs of people who have hardly heard the names of Copernicus and Darwin and have never heard the names of Spinoza and Kant, and there are many such people, ready to submit.
But how can a religion that deals in thought and uses preaching as its means of guidance adapt itself to a boundless universe in which the planet that held the highest rank and was the seat of the Son of God's descent is defined as a passing speck wandering in space, and the kind of creature for whose salvation Christ gave his life becomes a changing being on the imaginative stage of life? When the Bible, accepted as the only unshakable basis of Protestantism, is subjected to a higher criticism that makes the word of God into Hebrew literature and turns Christ into a mold of the mystical theology of the apostle Paul, what is left of that religion?"
Christianity and the Age of Reason
For the modern mind the real problem is no longer between Catholicism and Protestantism, or between the Reformation and the Renaissance, but between Christianity and the Enlightenment, an age whose dates are not easily fixed, but whose start in Europe was marked by the coming of Francis Bacon, and whose hopes were built on reason, science and philosophy. As art was the keynote of the Renaissance and religion the soul of the Reformation, science and philosophy became the worshiped gods of the Enlightenment. In this light the Renaissance directly continued the course of development of the European mind until it reached the Enlightenment, and the Reformation was only a detour from that course, for it discredited reason and turned back to medieval faith.
Even so, the Reformation, despite its inherent fanaticism, did two services for the Enlightenment. First, it broke the authority of dogma and produced a hundred new sects that should have perished a little earlier. Second, it spread among those sects such a manly debate that in the end reason became the only court to judge the claims of each of them, unless some were backed by irresistible military force. In that suit and that attack and defense, all sects and all dogmas were exposed and humbled; and not yet a century after Luther's insistence on the primacy of faith, Francis Bacon declared that knowledge is power.
In the same seventeenth century thinkers such as Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke offered philosophy as a substitute for, or a foundation of, religion. In the eighteenth century Helvétius, Holbach and La Mettrie declared atheism, and Voltaire, who believed in the existence of God, was called a bigot. This was the cry of protest that again challenged Christianity, and the crisis it produced was far more severe than the dispute between Catholic and Protestant interpretations of the principles of medieval faith. Christianity's struggle to survive the attack of Copernicus and Darwin has produced the real drama of the last three hundred years. Compared with this great spiritual war, what are the battles between states and classes worth?
Sympathy for All Sides
Now, looking back over the long and checkered story told in these pages, we feel sympathy for all the brave who fought on its many fronts. We can now grasp Luther's anger at the corruption and domination of Rome, the German princes' hatred of fattening Italy with church tithes, the determination of Calvin and Knox to create societies that would be moral models, and Henry VIII's desire for an heir to his throne and for every power in his country. But we can also understand why Erasmus wished for reforms that would not rouse hatred in Christendom, and we can feel why Roman prelates such as Contarini so loathed the possible breaking up of the Church, which for centuries had been the nurse and guardian of western civilization and still stood as the strongest breakwater against the onrush of moral corruption, confusion and despair.
What Was Not Wasted
Not a particle of all these forces and efforts was wasted. An individual falls, but if he has left something to humanity, he is never wiped from the page of time. Protestantism in due time helped to revive the moral life of Europe, and it was in awe of it that the Church purified itself and became an organization politically weaker but morally stronger than before. (This sentence is reconstructed from garbled text.) From the smoke that remains over the battlefield we take this lesson: religion remains at the peak of its perfection when it has to live by competition; and wherever and whenever it has no rival or opponent facing it, it takes on a state of fanaticism and rigidity.
The greatest gift of the Reformation was that it made Europe and America an arena of rivalry among different faiths. That led each faith to be stirred up in its own defense, to find its interest in the use of intellectual tolerance, and also to give our feeble minds the courage and desire to understand freedom.
Reader! Take heart; we are nearing the end of the discourse.