THUS all over Europe commercialism 93 was rising. New needs were being discovered by men who were gaining fresh mastery over nature, and were set free from old restraints to struggle for individual pre-eminence. A fresh intelligence and mental energy was shedding its light over the more sordid side of the period of change. The study of the Greek literature at first hand was aiding this new intelligence among cultivated men, and also, since they did but half understand its spirit, was warping their minds into fresh error. For the science of history and the critical observation of events had not yet been born; and to 94 the ardent spirits of the Renaissance, there had never been but two peoples worth notice—to wit, the Greeks and Romans, whom their new disciples strove to imitate in every thing which was deemed of importance at the time.
Now also, as at all periods of intellectual ferment, Occultism, that is the magical conception of nature, obtained a numerous following. This, of course, was partly the result of the study of the recently-discovered writings of the last period of transition,—that of the early Christian centuries,—the Neo-Platonic and other Hermetic literature, joined to the fact that science, in the modern acceptation of the word, was in its first dawning. The science of the Renaissance is mainly a systematisation of medieval traditional science, with an admixture of the later classical and oriental theories, to which no doubt is added a certain amount of the results of genuine observation. It is represented by such men as Paracelsus, Nostradamus, and Cornelius Agrippa, and, we may add, by the mythical Dr. Faustus.
Amidst all this it is clear that the old 95 religion would no longer serve the new spirit of the times. The mediæval church, the kingdom of heaven on earth, in full sympathy with the temporal hierarchy, in which also every one had his divinely appointed place, and which restricted commerce and forbade usury, such was no religion for the new commercialism ; the latter’s creed must have nothing to do with the business of this world; so the individualist ethics of early Christianity, which had been kept in the background during the period of the mediaeval church, were once more brought to the front, and took the place of the corporate ethics of that church, of which each one of the “faithful” was but a part.
A new form of Christianity, therefore, had to be found to suit the needs of the new Europe which was being born: but this adaptation of Christianity took two shapes, so widely different from each other that they have usually been opposed as contrasting religions, which is an inaccurate view to take of the matter, since they are but two sides of the same shield. These two forms were Protestantism, and modern or Jesuitised Catholicism; 96 the protagonists of either side being nameable as Martin Luther and Ignatius Loyala. Almost the whole Teutonic race adopted Protestantism in one or other of its forms, and the leading men among them accepted its teachings with depth and sincerity: amongst the Latinised nations it made no real progress, and wherever it gained many adherents, as in the case of the French Huguenots, it was little more than a political badge. It is worthy of remark, too, that, at the present day, in Geneva, the city of Calvin, which is really a French city, the Catholics considerably outnumber the Protestants. It may be noted, as showing the real strength of the Protestant feeling in the north of Europe, that in those countries where the religious struggle was most severe—as in Scotland, England, Holland, and Switzerland—the quality that finally predominated made the form of religion the furthest removed from medieval Catholicism: while in places where the Reformation made itself, so to say, as in Scandinavia and the north of Germany, the outward change was comparatively slight.
The Protestant Puritanism which 1s 97 even yet so strong in these islands, has no analogue in the Protestantism of the rest of Europe, but is a strange isolated fact, the result probably of some qualities inherent in the population, and developed by circumstances: indeed there are traces of it discoverable in medieval England, and that not amongst the Lollards only; and it must be confessed that the origin of this spirit is as obscure as the fact of its existence is baneful. Its long-enduring and deep-seated strength may be gauged by the success that always attends appeals made to it in the present day by time-serving politicians and popularity-hunting journalists.71
Modern Catholicism, as above said, is personally represented by Ignatius Loyala, whose order of Jesus practically changed the whole face of the religion. Mediæval Catholicism was the natural growth of that simple and naive conception of the universe which we have commented on before, and a member of the church of the Middle Ages was always surrounded 98 by the sense of his membership, and could not step out of it in the performance of the ordinary acts of his life. Protestantism was a recrudescence of the individualist religion of early Christianity. Jesuitical Catholicism, while retaining all the old medieval forms, was really more akin to the Protestantism of the times which had created both. It was no growth of the ages, but a product of the necessities of the ecclesiasticism of the Renaissance. The humanist learning of the period, which at first disregarded Christianity altogether, passed in the end into this Jesuitised, casuistical form of Christianity; and it must be noted here that the education of Catholic countries in the centuries that followed the Reformation fell almost entirely into the hands of the Jesuits. It is true that the missions carried on amongst barbarous peoples by the Order, so famous for their complete organisation, and the unshrinking devotion of the brethren, were also distinguished by the humanity of their treatment of these peoples, and offer a strong contrast to the brutality of the commercial bureaucracies 99 and their buccaneering fringes. Yet though they showed the good side of the change from mediæval to modern life, the end of their powerful organisation was the establishment of that spirit of commercial society to which both this modified Catholicism and the so-called Reformed religions were but adjuncts. It is significant that they carefully abstained from following the example of the mediæval church in condemning the grosser forms of commerce such as usury; and, in short, their religion, like that of the Protestants, was not of this world. Hence they were essentially allies of the rising bureaucratic system in equal measure with their opponents,As regards politics, Charles V. is the personality representing the great change on that side of things. The welding of Spain into a nation, begun under Ferdinand and Isabella, the conquerors of Granada, was accomplished by him. Under the pressure of his attempts to unify Germany in the same manner, the rulers of the great territories, the princes of the Empire, consolidated their lands, and turned them 100 from feudal domains into political nations, as Prussia, Brunswick, Saxony, Bavaria, Brandenburg, Hesse Cassel, Wurtemberg, and others of less importance.
Charles V.’s rival, Francis I., continued the consolidation of the French kingdom, begun with such vigour, astuteness, and consequent success, by Louis XI. In England the Tudor monarchy put the last touch to the creation of a political nation, under the cover of the strange phantasm of the divine right of kings,—so contrary to the mediæval idea of the responsibility of the king to the feudal hierarchy in general,—which seems to have been partly the outcome of the Puritan worship of the Old Testament with its despotic oriental principles.
All this meant the crushing out of the old feudal vassals, the creation of a fresh nobility wholly dependent on the king, mere courtiers waiting on his person, or functionaries appointed to manage his estate; for the new political nation was regarded as the property of the king, who no longer owned any 101 responsibility to any one, as a king, not even to his God.
All this change, ecclesiastical and civil, was not accomplished without a certain amount of protest in the form of direct revolt, the most noteworthy event of which was the Peasant War in Germany (1525-1526). At this time, throughout Europe, the increase in luxury drove the lords of the land to harsher exactions than ever for the procuring of money for dealing with the merchants, and the usurer grew in importance at the same time. Against this oppression there rose, and spread with extraordinary rapidity (at the above-mentioned date), an insurrection more widespread than any previous revolts of the Middle Ages, one of the leading figures in which was Thomas Münzer. He put forward a sort of mystical commission, which proclaimed the brotherhood of Christians, and the economical and social equality of all men. His doctrines were widely accepted, but he was, after some weeks of power, defeated, and executed near Mülhausen (in Turingia) 102 in 1525. It must be said, however, that there was more than one strain in the Peasant War. The great princes of the Empire, under cover of suppression of the rebels, sought to consolidate their power, and to complete the subjugation of the smaller feudal nobility, “the knighthood.” These had had their last champion in the celebrated Ulric von Hutten, who, amidst a life of romantic adventure and studious occupation, attacked the higher nobles with the full power of his literary genius, and worked hard on the side of the knights under the leadership of Franz von Sickingen in 1522-1523. The princes triumphed, and therewith the political side of medieval Germany came to an end.
As for Münzer, he may be considered as the precursor of the later Anabaptist revolt; for the movement in which he worked, after this collapse, sprang up again, and, continuing in an underground manner, culminated at last in the Anabaptist rising under John of Leyden, the last act of which was the siege and capture of Münster, and the massacre of the rebels in that city.
The religious wars of France, and 103 the revolt of the Huguenots against the reigning monarchs, can hardly be brought within the category of these popular movements; but were rather contests between factions, neither of whom had really any special principles to maintain.
In England a series of revolts took place during the reigns of the last two Henries, and into the reign of Elizabeth, which were mostly directed against fiscal oppression, the necessary result of the new bureaucratic rule. The most important of these was that led by Kett in Norfolk. They were one and all put down with various degrees of wholesale massacre and cruelty.
The middle of the sixteenth century, therefore, brings us to this, that the animating spirit of feudal society is dead, though its forms still exist, and are used for its own purposes by the bureaucratic system, which has now supplanted feudalism throughout the length and breadth of Europe. This must be considered as the beginning of the first period of modern History.
71. Cf. the case of the late Mr. Parnell, overthrown by it in the very hour of his triumph.Back