Readers who make it past the first sentences of this book realize that it has a strong point of view. But unlike many supposedly “historical” books with a strong point of view, this one is for real—exhaustively researched, clearly argued, and with research transparently displayed to support the argument. In my judgment as a Protestant historian of generally Augustinian convictions, I believe that it powerfully demonstrates the summary conclusion offered near the end: “Judged on their own terms and with respect to the objectives of their own leading protagonists, medieval Christendom failed, the Reformation failed, confessionalized Europe failed, and Western modernity is failing, but each in different ways and with different consequences” (365).
Because Gregory has provided an especially effective account of the partially realized ideal of Christianity set forth in early medieval Christendom, my critique of the book requires a brief account of the three interlocking facets of the ideal. First was affirmation of a non-univocal relationship between God and the world. Gregory defines non-univocal as the approach taken by the best Christian theologians from the Cappadocian Fathers and Augustine through Thomas Aquinas. Because God represented a different order of being than the creation, human accounts of God might catch glimpses of what God was actually like, but humans could never presume to know God in his transcendent essence in the same way they could learn about the immanent creation.
Yet, second, this same ineffable deity had revealed himself to human creatures on human terms by freely choosing to enter the created realm as a person. In the incarnation of Christ, the infinitely hidden God became the particularly revealed God. The great emblem, instantiation, and reenactment of God's saving work was the Eucharist, the jewel of the sacramental approach to life that Christ ordained in order to maintain his perpetual presence in the world. The Eucharist was also the mysterious intersection of the transcendent and the immanent, the eternal and the temporal, the divine and the human.
That combination of non-univocal metaphysics and sacramental realism undergirded the third facet of ideal medieval Christianity, its embodiment as “an institutionalized world view” (3, 21, 44). Because God-in-Christ was the redeemer of bodies as well as souls, communities as well as persons, the religion that Christ's followers practiced necessarily entailed ecclesiastical organization, economic transactions, political order, family relationships, and every other aspect of daily life. The practice of Christianity, as interpreted most clearly in Augustine's works, reflected the divine caritas, but it also included divinely revealed principles of order.
This is the ideal of Christianity that, according to Gregory, was developing from patristic practices and authors like Augustine, and then in a long line leading to a richly various culmination in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. My critique concerns neither his glowing account of the ideal nor his assessment of the late-modern alternatives. Instead, it concerns the historical rendering of how human kind got from there to here. Gregory has mis-titled his book, which should be “The Inconsistent Middle Ages and the Unintended Reformation: The One-Two Punch that Secularized Society.” The extent to which the medieval ideal was already compromised before 1519 defines the extent to which Protestant reformers subverted the ideal after 1519.
The life of Martin Luther provides a useful tool for making this critique. The book's first chapter explains in considerable detail how extensively Roman Catholic theology of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had embraced univocal metaphysics and the theological nominalism it entailed. As scholars like Louis Bouyer and Heiko Oberman have argued, the torment of soul that Martin Luther long experienced was demonstrably worsened by his training in nominalist, univocal theology. Either God peremptorily chose those who would be redeemed or humans eager for salvation really could do what lay within themselves to move toward God. Luther was reasoning about divine salvation as if God were within the framework of nature; his soul was tormented by a contradiction in terms. Luther needed a theology of salvation that explained how God could be both infinitely powerful and infinitely loving. Yet when Luther in the Augustinian cloister at Erfurt asked for bread, formal Catholic theology gave him a stone. When his passionate struggle to discover a merciful God led him to attack indulgences and so to disturb Rome, the Archbishop of Mainz, and the Holy Roman Emperor, late-medieval Christendom was reaping what its own univocal theology had sown.
Luther's case also requires a slight, but significant adjustment to Gregory's claim that debates over authority and the Bible “were [my emphasis] the most fundamental questions of the Reformation” (89). Luther's biography suggests instead that although these issues became the most fundamental questions of the Reformation, in the beginning the presenting question was soteriological—how he could experience “the righteousness of God” as a blessing instead of a curse. Similarly, for many others among the first Protestants—the early Ulrich Zwingli; Robert Barnes, John Frith, even William Tyndale and Thomas Cranmer in England; Patrick Hamilton in Scotland; and many more—salvation was the first concern, and only consequently authority.
In late October 1517 Luther's Ninety-Five Theses attacked the traffic in indulgences, but referred only incidentally to scripture. Five months later in April 1518, one of the first public meetings to debate the broader implications of Luther's attack on indulgences convened at Heidelberg under the auspices of his Augustinian order. In formulating theses for debate at Heidelberg, Luther made a stronger appeal to scripture, but his principal concern was to differentiate between what he called “a theology of glory” that brought death and “a theology of the cross” that brought life.
Formal questions of authority only became explicit when in October 1518 Luther was called to Augsburg and a meeting with Cardinal Thomas Cajetan, who had been dispatched by Pope Leo X to rein in this German wild boar. Those questions about authority became even more explicit the next July, 1519, in a lengthy public meeting at Leipzig where Luther disputed over many days with the papal champion John Eck about the questions that had proliferated in the wake of Luther's initial challenge to the indulgence trade. The Unintended Reformation refers several times to the extensive claims about the authority of scripture that Luther made at Leipzig, and also, by implication, about the ability of individual believers to find in scripture a common message concerning salvation, the sacraments, church authority, and much more—if only they would forsake corrupt ecclesiastical interpreters and read the text for themselves.
Significantly, however, the meetings at Augsburg and Leipzig featured one element that had been mostly absent when Luther proposed the Ninety-Five Theses for university debate and only marginally present when he and his fellow Augustinians debated soteriology at Heidelberg. That element was the coercive fact of Christendom. Cardinal Cajetan was in Augsburg because that is where the German imperial diet was meeting, and the pope needed his diplomat to carry on high-level negotiations with the German princes. Whatever the ecclesiastical reasons for Cajetan's interview with Luther, it also occurred because the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, had complained to Pope Leo about Luther's attack on the indulgence traffic. Delicate diplomacy was necessary because in late 1518 the Emperor was not only worried about Luther's bad influence but was also dying. As a consequence, the entire edifice of papal Christendom was scrambling to prepare for the election of a new Emperor. Then, between the time of Luther's audience with Cardinal Cajetan in Augsburg and when he took up the cudgels against John Eck in Leipzig, Maximilian died; the very week that Eck and Luther began their debate the Empire's electors chose the young king of Spain, who became known as Charles V, to succeed Maximilian. Because of how intimately the affairs of state and church had become interconnected in the centuries before 1520, Pope Leo X was involved up to his eyeballs in the maneuvering that led to the election of the new Emperor. Far more important than pastoring the renegade Augustinian monk from Wittenberg was the need to protect the Papal States and its revenues through complicated power politics.
This brief summary sketches the backdrop as Luther's protest exploded into a full-scale challenge to late-medieval Catholicism; it indicates what kind of ecclesiastical embodiment the Christianity of western Christendom was enduring in the early sixteenth century. The Catholic response to Luther would not have been inconsistent with the medieval ideal if it had balanced coercion with caritas in trying to recall him to that ideal. In actual fact, it acted toward Luther with almost total disregard for caritas and an all-out commitment to coercion. Luther had to be declared a heretic because he complicated papal relations with the Emperor, he threatened the income stream required from indulgences, and he undermined the architectural ambitions of the Renaissance Papacy.
The one-time head of the Augustinian order, Johannes von Staupitz, was also worried about the implications of Luther's outbursts because he loved the church, he loved Christ's gospel, and he loved Martin Luther. Staupitz tried to rein in Luther with a balance of caritas and coercion. Staupitz also drew on the best non-univocal theology of the ideal medieval Christianity when he urged Luther to “view predestination in the wounds of Christ.” But Staupitz's efforts never had a chance against the rush to pure coercion that motivated pope, cardinal, bishop, and the Dominicans who went after the Augustinian monk in order simply to put him down.
The key thing, with respect to the arguments of The Unintended Reformation, was that the overwhelming deployment of coercion had long since become standard Catholic practice. Gregory mentions at one point that egregious instances of coercion driving out caritas extended back to the twelfth century, but they can traced much further, for example, to Augustine himself when in the early fifth century he abandoned efforts to bring the Donatists back into the Catholic fold through persuasion and turned to military force exercised by imperial legions. As it was for Augustine who articulated the ideal of an embodied church blending caritas and coercion, so it was through the centuries that followed. If gold rust, what then will iron do?
The pages of The Unintended Reformation define the problem clearly. By the sixteenth century, Catholic “ecclesiastics and secular leaders never succeeded in consistently combining caritas with coercion in the exercise of power” (196). And with respect to the generation confronted by Luther's challenge: “In multiple ways and with supreme irony, the ecclesiastical prelates with whom [Machiavelli] rubbed shoulders had themselves in fact modeled the separation of morality from politics” (200).
The problem that came to expression in the early sixteenth century was more the result of a corrupted system than corrupt individuals. The medieval Christian ideal had become a Christendom where the sword drove out the shepherd's crook. Without dissenting in the main from Gregory's conclusions about the morass created by Protestant appeals to scriptura sola, the fundamental structural problem of the Reformation was not disagreement over principles of doctrinal authority; it was, rather, the church's institutional recourse to violence to quash challenges that threatened the power structures of late-medieval Christendom. A pope who relied on the coercion of Charles V deserved a reformer who relied on the protection of Frederick the Wise.
No one has documented with greater force the fraught legacy that coercion without caritas bequeathed to Europe than Brad Gregory in Salvation at Stake (Camridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). The disputes that tore Christendom apart and thus made way for modern secularism were disputes over authority that Protestant movements were certainly responsible for propelling. But the way those disputes were embodied in coercive regimes was a legacy of the Catholic middle ages.
Evidence supporting this claim is stronger than counter-factual speculation since we know what has actually happened since the Second Vatican Council and the full Catholic embrace in Dignitatis Humanae of caritas over coercion. That bold move at Vatican II has resulted in an era of constructive mutual edification between Catholics and Protestants not witnessed since the 1520s, indeed not even imaginable less than a century ago. My conclusion from this recent history is that if medieval Christendom, and then Europe's confessional churches, had discovered a way to favor caritas over coercion (a task of admittedly great difficulty), the extraordinary range of convictions that Catholics and most Protestants continued to share after 1520—the Trinity, Christ understood by the Nicene Creed, scripture as inspired, the Ten Commandments—would have perhaps allowed Christian communities to hold back the tides of secularization more successfully.
In sum, the late-medieval turn away from non-univocal metaphysics as well as the practice by Christendom's central institutions of coercion over caritas cut the channels in which the effects of Protestantism would run. The Reformation would not have secularized the West if medieval Christendom had not already fatally undermined the medieval Christian ideal.
