In politics, I doubt very much that our current situation would exist, even remotely. I believe the Catholic monarchies of Europe considered Britain, the Netherlands, and Lutheran princes to be dangerously radical in their relative egalitarianism. England’s republican-lite suffrage developed far beyond Magna Carta, after the Reformation. The limits on the monarch, freedom of religion, and comparatively free press were very Protestant ideas.
They were
Puritan ideas in the seventeenth century (well, freedom of religion was only a Puritan idea with heavy qualification, at least until the Puritans lost the struggle to impose their religion on the country). But the idea of a limited monarchy long pre-existed the Reformation. Absolute monarchy was the new kid on the block in the sixteenth century. Anglicans, Lutherans, and most German Reformed endorsed it. Puritans and the “Genevan” wing of Continental Reformed Protestantism endorsed limited government.
Yes, the Lutheran princes argued for limited government in the sense that they wanted to limit the
emperor’s power over *them, * but certainly not for egalitarianism within their own dominions!
Maybe the vibrant medieval city-state culture was dying anyway–in fact, I think it clearly was. Maybe the rise of absolute monarchy was inevitable, and maybe it would have been steeper and longer-lasting without the Reformation (without, that is, the clash between absolutists of different confessions and the subversive influence of the radical wing of Calvinism). But there *were *countervailing voices defending what was left of medieval republicanism and arguing for a
corpus christianum characterized by consensus and participation. The Holy Roman Empire theoretically was the overarching political structure for all of Christian Europe. The Reformation killed the idea of a unified Christian empire–which by its very nature could not be absolutist and had to involve a good deal of negotiation and participation–and strengthened the hands of the rising nation-states.
In law, the Inns of Court in London were definitely influenced by Protestant principles of private judgment and freedom of conscience, ideas rejected by Pius IX and others. The right to silence, the “golden thread” of presumed innocence before proven guilt, and other ideas of law which we take for granted, were created within English Protestant philosophical humanism.
Well, if wikipedia is right the “innocent until proven guilty” principle should be credited rather to a
medieval cardinal. I don’t know a lot about the history of legal thought, but in a lot of cases the things that Whig propaganda have ascribed to British Protestantism actually have medieval roots.
Many of these things
could quite conceivably have continued to flourish within the Catholic Church, as they had begun to do in the Middle Ages.
In terms of the second half of the title, what churches would look like, we know the Gothic revolution was at its height and beginning to give way to Classicism by 1510. Without the Protestant drive to destroy images, crosses, and statues, and to “clean up” the churches, who knows how things would have developed? English, Swedish, and Lutheran baroque were very austere and minimalist, compared to the explosive Jesuit, French, and Italian churches of later days.
Yes, and that extravagance was in many ways a statement of anti-Protestant apologetic.
I don’t think Rome would have developed altars versus-populum without the perceived need for ecumenical outreach to Protestantism. I don’t think Rome would have allowed a vernacular Mass without Protestantism as an example.
Why do you think this? There was considerable pressure for the vernacular–it was a much-debated reform in the sixteenth century, along with clerical marriage and communion in both kinds. Roman resistance to all three of these things seems to have had a lot to do with reaction against the Reformation–these reforms, which in themselves had good Catholic credentials (well, not the marriage of already ordained clergy the ordination of married men) , were discredited by their association with heresy.
The idea that the changes of Vatican II were “Protestantizations” is, it seems to me, traditionalist propaganda. In fact most of them were things that made sense in terms of Catholic tradition but which had long been rejected out of polemical reaction to Protestantism. The “ressourcement” of the 20th century resumed the agenda of sixteenth-century Biblical humanism (OK, that’s oversimplified).
Of course, we don’t know–I’m just emphasizing one set of possibilities, because everyone seems to assume the other set.
As Aslan says in
Prince Caspian, no one can know what would have happened–but anyone can find out what
will happen.
Edwin
