The eleven papers in this volume deal with the problem of theological reconciliation and the re-establishment of ecclesiastical unity in the period from the Papal Schism to the aftermath of the Thirty Years' War. Dealing with a period noteworthy for the general lack of conciliation and the growing emphasis on confessional orthodoxy rather than compromise, these essays highlight the difficulties that hindered efforts of both individuals and groups to restore unity to the church.
The first two papers deal with conciliation via a church council in the late medieval church. Karlfried Froehlich shows how early conciliarist theologians interpreted scripture in order to justify the authority of a general council to resolve the Papal Schism. Nicholas Constas looks at the Council of Florence, called to resolve a different schism, that dividing the Greek and the Latin churches. He highlights the importance of divergent theological traditions as well as significant cultural differences as reasons for that council's ultimate failure.
The four articles devoted to the period of the Reformation focus primarily on individuals. Erika Rummal describes the several proposals, some of them mutually contradictory, for restoring church unity that Erasmus advanced in his 1533 treatise De sarcienda concordia. Euan Cameron looks at how the principles of moderation and reasonableness underlay Philipp Melanchthon's efforts at conciliation, from the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 through his reaction to the Interim in 1548. Randall Zachman argues that Jean Calvin's understanding of the rhetorical mode of the sermo or discussion allowed him to accept some diversity of opinion on theological issues, as long as those holding divergent views accepted the essentials of the faith. In the last essay of this set, Irena Backus compares the way that two Catholic moderates, Georg Cassander and Georg Witzel, looked to the early church as a model for restoring religious unity: the former by trying to find the portion of the truth that existed within all heresies, and the latter by looking to the unity provided by continuity in liturgical rites and ceremonies.
The remaining essays step back from the individual to look at efforts at conciliation and reconciliation through the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in different parts of Europe, with the focus on central and eastern Europe. Karin Maag argues that toleration, not conciliation, was the goal of the French Huguenots during the French Wars of Religion, and the conciliatory works of Jean de Serres, published during the 1590s, met only with sharp rejection from his fellow Protestants. Graeme Murdock focuses on Hungary, arguing that Reformed irenicism in the seventeenth century was not a legacy of Hungary's tolerant climate of the sixteenth century but should instead be seen as an effort to create a common front in response to growing pressures from the Habsburgs and the Catholic Church. Zdenek David also sees a change in how the Catholic Church regarded the Utraquists in Bohemia after the Council of Trent. In this case, foreign Jesuit theologians taught their Bohemian students to see the Utraquists not as a group in communion with the Catholics and distinct from the Lutherans and the more clearly Protestant Unity of the Brethren, but rather to lump them with the other heretical groups and so to condemn them. Howard Louthan focuses on the career of the Capuchin diplomat and churchman Valerian Magni in Bohemia and Poland-Lithuania, emphasising Magni's willingness to enter into dialogue with both Protestants and Orthodox.
In the final and longest contribution to the volume, Howard Hotson surveys the stages of irenicism in the Holy Roman Empire from the mid-sixteenth to the later seventeenth century, tying them to broader political developments. Through most of this period, irenic literature concerned only reunion of the two Protestant confessions, not reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics. The exclusion of the Reformed churches from the legal protection of the Peace of Augsburg encouraged their theologians to seek reconciliation with the Lutherans, but because Reformed gains were made at Lutheran expense, the latter were bound to reject those irenic overtures. Only when threatened themselves with the loss of political protection during the Thirty Years' War did Lutheran theologians become more open to finding theological agreement with the Reformed, but when their political situation improved in the 1630s, they again lost interest in such dialogue. The Peace of Westphalia brought a significant change to ecumenical dialogue within the Empire. Threatened by the more powerful states surrounding them, both Protestants and Catholics became involved in efforts to promote ecclesiastical reunion.
If there is a common thread running through the book, it is the failure of even the most dedicated efforts to bridge the deep divisions separating the confessions. Still, it is useful to be reminded that those efforts were being made at all, and to explore the reasons for their failure.
