The Reformation

Origins

The immediate trigger was Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, posted (according to tradition) on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Saxony, on 31 October 1517. Luther was a German Augustinian friar and theology professor protesting the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences — papal documents purporting to remit punishment for sins, used at the time to finance the rebuilding of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

Luther’s theological position went substantially further than the indulgences question. He argued that salvation came through faith alone (sola fide), that Scripture alone was the source of religious authority (sola scriptura), that the priesthood had no special intermediary role between believer and God, and that the Catholic sacramental system had no basis in Scripture beyond the eucharist and baptism.

These positions, in the institutional context of the early-16th-century Catholic Church, were heretical. Luther was excommunicated by Pope Leo X in January 1521 and outlawed by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms in April 1521. He survived because the Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, protected him.

Why it spread

Luther’s challenge succeeded where earlier challenges (Wycliffe, Hus) had failed for several specific reasons:

• The printing press, recently developed (Gutenberg, c. 1440), made the rapid mass distribution of Luther’s writings possible. Approximately 300,000 copies of Luther’s tracts were in circulation by 1520.
• German national feeling had been intensifying against Italian-papal financial extraction.
• The Holy Roman Empire’s decentralised political structure gave individual princes the ability to protect heretical reformers from the central authorities.
• Pre-existing reform movements within the Catholic Church (Christian humanism, Erasmus’s textual scholarship, the Devotio Moderna) had already prepared educated audiences for substantial religious change.

The reformers

The reform movement quickly fragmented:

• Lutheranism spread across northern Germany, Scandinavia, and the Baltic.
• Reformed Protestantism, developed by Huldrych Zwingli in Zurich and (after his death) by John Calvin in Geneva, took hold in Switzerland, parts of Germany, the Netherlands, Scotland, and (briefly) France.
• Anglicanism developed in England after Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534 over the question of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. The English Reformation eventually settled into a distinctive middle position between Catholic and Reformed Protestant theology.
• Anabaptism — radical reform movements that rejected infant baptism, often advocated pacifism and the separation of church and state, and were persecuted by both Catholics and mainstream Protestants. Modern descendants include the Mennonites, Amish, and Hutterites.

Counter-Reformation

The Catholic Church responded with the Counter-Reformation, beginning institutionally at the Council of Trent (1545–1563). The Council reaffirmed Catholic doctrine, reformed clerical training, and standardised the liturgy. New religious orders — most importantly the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), founded by Ignatius of Loyola in 1540 — pursued missionary and educational work. The Roman Inquisition was established or reinvigorated to combat Protestant influence.

The Counter-Reformation succeeded in recovering significant portions of central Europe (Poland, Bohemia, parts of Hungary, the southern Netherlands) for Catholicism but failed to dislodge Protestantism from its northern strongholds.

The wars

The religious division produced a century and a half of intermittent warfare in Europe. The major conflicts were the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598), the Dutch Revolt against Catholic Spain (1568–1648), the Thirty Years’ War in Germany and central Europe (1618–1648), and the English Civil War (1642–1651). The Thirty Years’ War alone killed approximately 8 million people. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) established the modern principle of territorial religious sovereignty — each ruler’s religion would be the religion of his territory.

The Reformation’s intellectual and institutional legacy is the entire modern Protestant Christian world (~1 billion people, in dozens of denominations), substantial elements of the Catholic Church’s modern self-understanding, and many of the core ideas of modern secular politics (individual conscience, the separation of church and state, mass literacy).