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| ISBN-13: | 9780745968926 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Lion Books |
| Publication date: | 11/18/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Sales rank: | 792,579 |
| File size: | 611 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
"Faith Alone": The Reformation
In order to understand the historical context of the religious environment in which Shakespeare lived, worked, thought, and believed, it is necessary to understand the English Reformation. The Reformation was a complex and wide-ranging series of revolutions within Christianity that took place across a few decades of the sixteenth century and which permanently affected church government, theology, access to the holy Scriptures, collective worship, and individual devotion, and had far-reaching implications for politics, ethics, and culture, including of course literature and drama. And though it is difficult to speak of the Reformation, especially in a brief introduction, without oversimplifying it, few people would dispute that something momentous happened between 1517, when Martin Luther mounted his first challenge to the church's authority, and 1563, when the Council of Trent consolidated the Catholic response familiarly known as the Counter-Reformation. Certainly the world into which Shakespeare was born in 1564 would not have been the same without these radical, decisive, and permanent changes.
The Reformation was essentially a European event. Its major thinkers and ideologues were Europeans — the German Martin Luther, the Swiss Huldrych Zwingli, the Frenchman John Calvin. The Protestant challenge to the papal church's authority, and the subsequent separation of Protestant churches from Rome, happened first on the Continent. I will be concerned in this book mainly with the Reformation in England, where it touched directly upon Shakespeare's life and work. But it is also necessary to sketch its European origins, and to take account of some international developments, especially in France and in Italy, that impinged on Shakespeare himself, influenced the character of his own religious beliefs, and which are visible in his dramatic works.
Although there were earlier currents, and even movements, of reform within the Catholic Church, the Reformation proper can reasonably be dated from 1517, when Augustinian friar Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses ("Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences") to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. Luther was Professor of Theology ("Doctor of Bible") at the new university, later to be fictionally attended by Shakespeare's Hamlet and Horatio. His main target was the church's system of indulgences, which promised remission from punishment in purgatory in exchange for the performance of good works, or a financial payment. Neither doctrine has any precedent in Scripture, and many at the time considered the church's system to be little more than a money-making racket. So Luther was tapping into genuine reservations, shared by some Catholics, about the church's teaching on the crucial issues of penance and satisfaction.
If the church would not reform so manifest an abuse as the sale of indulgences, Luther began to realize, it must be fundamentally wrong about other things as well. His objections to the church's teaching that people could be saved by acquiring "merit" in the eyes of God, led him to the conclusion that faith alone was sufficient for salvation. "The just shall live by faith" (Romans 1:17), said St Paul. Luther preferred to add "by faith alone". The basis of faith lay in the Scriptures, not in any non-scriptural doctrines of the church, and we are saved not by our own merits, but solely by the grace of God, expressed through the redeeming sacrifice of Christ. Luther followed St Paul: "Not by the works of righteousness, which we had done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of the new birth, and the renewing of the holy Ghost" (Titus 3:5). Catholic tradition, derived from St Augustine, combined justification with sanctification: man could be transformed by his own good works into a creature acceptable to God. Luther recognized no such possibility. No Christian can ever guarantee his own salvation, however many good works he may do, however much merit he may accumulate. Humanity remains entirely sinful, and is rendered righteous only by God's saving intervention. Righteousness, Luther said, is "imputed" to sinful humanity, rather than earned or deserved. Luther's metaphor imagines Christ as a bridegroom taking a sinful, damned soul as his bride. Each takes possession of what the other brings to the marriage: Christ assumes humanity's sin, and in exchange bestows ("imputes") the free gift of grace.
Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation. The soul is full of sins, death, and damnation. Now let faith come between them and sins, death, and damnation will be Christ's, while grace, life, and salvation will be the soul's; for if Christ is a bridegroom, he must take upon himself the things which are his bride's and bestow upon her the things that are his. If he gives her his body and very self, how shall he not give her all that is his? And if he takes the body of the bride, how shall he not take all that is hers?
On Christian Liberty, 1520
Humanity remains simul Justus ac peccator — a justified sinner. These radical ideas led to the formation of the central Protestant principle of the "solae": sola fide, sola scriptura, solus Christus (faith alone; Scripture alone; Christ alone). These are all that is necessary to salvation.
In 1521 the pope excommunicated Luther, whose response was to publicly burn the bull of excommunication in Wittenberg, and to publish a series of pamphlets releasing believers from obedience to canon law, reducing the seven sacraments to three (baptism, the Eucharist, and penance). Required to recant at the Diet of Worms, Luther refused: "Here I stand, I can do no other". Under the protection of the Elector Frederick of Saxony, Luther continued his campaign of reform and translated the New Testament into German. His was not the first German translation, but it became the most important. Vernacular translation of the Bible, already sponsored by Catholic reformers within the church — Erasmus was able to read the Bible in Dutch — became a key insistence of the Protestant Reformation. The Catholic Church retained the Latin "Vulgate" translation (right up to 1964, when the Second Vatican Council gave permission for parts of the Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular), and early vernacular Bible translators were persecuted. William Tyndale's English translation of the New Testament was the first to appear in print, and he was executed by Henry VIII for heresy. Only two years later, Henry licensed the English-language Great Bible, largely based on Tyndale's work, for use in churches, to be followed in 1568 by its successor the "Bishops' Bible". The English Bibles that supplied Shakespeare with hundreds of references and allusions had been current in the English church for only four decades before his birth. Yet up until the mid seventeenth century, more Bibles were printed and sold in England than anywhere else in Europe. Biblical quotations made their way into common speech, and the literature of the age is saturated with the English Bible.
Unlike the writings of earlier reformers, Luther's works were printed and published, using the new technology invented by Johannes Gutenberg that enabled radical ideas to be much more widely disseminated. The Reformation had begun. Eventually Luther's ideas were codified in 1530 in the "Augsburg Confession", which clearly set out the doctrinal principles of Lutheran Protestantism. The Confession affirms belief in the Trinity, original sin and its redemption through baptism, the reconciling efficacy of the incarnation, justification by faith, and the centrality of preaching. It accepts only two sacraments, baptism and the Eucharist, which it defines as containing the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine. The Augsburg Confession is a useful document, as it clearly differentiates Lutheranism not only from the Catholic Church, but also from other varieties of Protestantism that diverged much further from the traditional faith in the name of reform.
In Switzerland, Huldrych Zwingli agreed with Luther that Scripture was the only basis for truth, and that the pope had no real authority. He managed to obtain the support of the town council of Zurich to reform the church in the city: in 1524 images were removed from churches, clerical celibacy was abolished, and the following year a vernacular Communion service replaced the Latin Mass, administered not from an altar but from a wooden communion table, using wooden vessels. The people received the wine traditionally reserved for the clergy, as well as bread, in order to conform exactly to the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper as narrated in the Gospels. There were only two sacraments: baptism and Communion. Holy Orders and episcopacy were replaced by the ministry of pastors. Marriage became a civil ceremony.
In this case the switch from a universal obedience to Rome, to an independent Protestant church preaching and practising reformed doctrine, was both rapid and decisive. Simultaneously those who wanted reform to go further began to form recognizable groups, such as the Anabaptists who argued logically that infant baptism had no precedent in Scripture, and believers were baptized as adults (as is the case in the modern Baptist church). The spread of Reformation ideas in Germany precipitated the Peasants' War of 1524, led by the radical preacher Thomas Muntzer, whose thinking went beyond Luther's faith in Scripture to a belief in the "inner word" of private revelation. The revolt was brutally crushed, and Muntzer tortured and executed. In 1525 Luther had published a pamphlet encouraging the German princes to suppress the peasantry, an indication of how fast the tide of Reformation swelled, and how quickly Lutheran radicalism became conservative. Luther's teaching, particularly in its emphasis on direct personal reading of the Scriptures, in practice encouraged an independence of interpretation that far exceeded his own conception of reform.
The success of the Reformation did not lie in such popular "bottom-up" resistance, but in the emergence of political elites who saw advantage in adopting reformist (or, as Lutheranism came to be known, "evangelical") ideas. The princes of northern Germany welcomed the Protestantization of their churches, as did the Scandinavian kingdoms in the 1530s. It became possible within the Holy Roman Empire for self-governing states to decide for themselves on religious matters. The relations between church and state had fundamentally and irrevocably altered.
The Protestant states began to organize: in 1531 an alliance was formed by an agreement named after the town of Schmalkalden. Then in 1546, the year of Luther's death, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V attacked the Schmalkaldic League, and secured a temporary victory. The Reformation began to be pushed back. The Protestant states rallied, and in 1555 the Peace of Augsburg concluded an agreement based on the principle "cuius regia, eius religio" ("your religion is that of your ruler"). This allowed Protestant and Catholic territories to exist side by side. Religious diversity was recognized, at least in Germany. At the same time it became necessary for anyone unprepared to accept their ruler's religion to move in order to find freedom of worship. And so began an age of emigration for religious reasons, and a population of religious refugees (one of whom, as we shall see later, became Shakespeare's landlord).
John Calvin's reform of the Swiss town of Geneva was radical enough to have been called by some scholars a "second Reformation". The urban authorities were attached to the Zwinglian model, in which city magistrates controlled the church. Calvin preferred a church independent of the state, governed by a "consistory" of ministers, magistrates, and lay "elders", who would control church discipline and regulate morality. Calvin's power-base included many Protestant refugees from other states fleeing persecution, such as John Knox, who was escaping the Catholic regime of Mary Tudor. Knox later (1559) led a revolt against Queen Mary Stuart, and established a Calvinist church in Scotland — the church in which Shakespeare's king and patron James I was raised. Calvin's influence spread quickly to neighbouring France, producing the Protestant religious minority known as Huguenots. In the Spanish Netherlands Calvinism became the doctrine of anti-imperialist resistance, one side in the religious wars that eventually divided the Netherlands between Protestant Holland and Catholic Belgium.
By the end of the sixteenth century the Church of England was very strongly inflected towards Calvinism. The Book of Common Prayer codified much Calvinist doctrine, and most of the clergy were of Calvinist persuasion. The basic principles of Calvin's theology had become the official doctrine of the English church. The knowledge of God was not inherent in humanity, and could be discovered only in Scripture: sola scriptura. The world was ruled by a providence through which God works His will, quite unaffected by independent human agency. Humanity since the fall of Adam had been infected with original sin, which can be redeemed only through the intervention of divine grace working through the sacrifice of Christ: solus Christus. Christ atones for sin, and justifies humanity by a grace that comes only from God, and is in no way dependent on human action. The knowledge of God in Christ is faith only: sola fide. In faith humanity finds the possibility of repentance, and thus remission from sin. We can then know spiritual regeneration, which takes us back towards the state of holiness enjoyed by humanity before the fall. Complete perfection, however, remains unattainable, so the human soul will always be the arena of a conflict between grace and sin. Finally there is Calvin's doctrine of predestination: some human beings are predestined to salvation, "elected" or chosen by God; others are born to damnation or abandonment. There is no choice in this, and no freedom of the will; it is God's decision, and human beings can do nothing to alter their soteriological status.
*
In 1560, just before Shakespeare's birth, England, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway were all Protestant states. Germany was perhaps 80 per cent Protestant, and the Reformation had taken firm hold in France, the Netherlands, and Eastern Europe. By 1620, a few years after the time of Shakespeare's death, the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire had revived, reasserted the traditional faith, and subjugated many Protestant powers. The landmark event in this process, known negatively as the Counter-Reformation, or more positively as Catholic Renewal, was the Council of Trent (1545–63). Initially the Council concentrated on codifying Catholic doctrine to distinguish it from Protestant "heresy", and went on to introduce institutional reforms. In terms of doctrine Trent uncompromisingly condemned Protestant ideas like justification by faith: "If anyone saith that by faith alone the impious is justified ... let him be anathema." Trent rejected the Protestant insistence that only Scripture was necessary to salvation, and bestowed salvific efficacy on the traditions of the church, while affirming the Latin Vulgate Bible as the "authentic" form of Scripture. The Council standardized the Mass — the "Roman Rite" embodied in the Roman Missal published from 1570 to 1964 — and produced a common catechism for lay believers; tackled many abuses in church government; and introduced seminaries for the training of the clergy. Young Catholics from Protestant countries like England would flock to these seminaries in countries such as France. The Inquisition was set up as early as 1542, and an Index of prohibited books drawn up in 1559. The Catholic Church took on a spirit of renewal and evangelism: the Jesuit order had been established by Ignatius Loyola in 1534. Jesuit missionaries represented a powerful force in Europe, infiltrating Protestant nations such as Sweden and England, as well as preaching across Germany and Poland. Jesuit missionaries also play a significant, though ambiguous, role in the Shakespeare story.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Faith of William Shakespeare"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Graham Holderness.
Excerpted by permission of Lion Hudson Plc.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments 7
Preface 9
Chapter One “Faith alone”: The Reformation 15
Chapter Two “The only merits”: The faith of William Shakespeare 37
Chapter Three “Pattern to all princes”: The Famous History of the Life of King Henry VIII 59
Chapter Four “King of snow”: Richard II 79
Chapter Five “Mirror of all Christ ian kings”: Henry V 97
Chapter Six “A pattern in himself”: Measure for Measure 113
Chapter Seven “The quality of mercy”: The Merchant of Venice 137
Chapter Eight “A special providence”: Hamlet 161
Chapter Nine “Incomprehensible just ice”: King Lear 181
Chapter Ten “The hand of God”: The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale 203
Conclusion 215
Index 231