II. Definitions and Thesis

I am using the term “Age of Reform” to refer to the period from the Investiture Controversy to the conclusion of the Thirty Years War on the Continent and the end of the Civil War in England, thus, circa 1050 to circa 1650. This entire period was marked by an unprecedented and ever-increasing effort to make Europe more identifiably Christian through various kinds of reforms.Footnote ⁴ Already in 1980, my Doktorvater, Steven Ozment, entitled his religious history of late medieval and Reformation Europe The Age of Reform; it remains one of the finest treatments of the period to appear in the last several decades.Footnote ⁵ I understand the Protestant Reformation to be a pivotal movement within the Age of Reform that was significantly shaped by the reforms that preceded it, but which also introduced qualitatively new and radical elements of change into the mission to further Christianize Europe.Footnote ⁶ The explosive effects of the Protestant revolution lasted until at least the mid-seventeenth century, in their initial phase; they are still very much with us today.Footnote ⁷

My definition of “verbal consolation” is similarly expansive.Footnote ⁸ The term refers to a host of writings and practices intended to soothe feelings of pain and loss and to provide hope through various verbal remedies. In the Age of Reform there were many different kinds of consolation writings, or writings that included consolation: letters, poems, hymns, published sermons, diaries, autobiographies, works of devotion, pastoral manuals, church orders, biblical commentaries, and formal theological treatises. Similarly, the practice of verbal consolation took place in numerous contexts, including the confessional, during Communion, at the deathbed, during childbirth, via sermons, in the lecture hall, in the monastery, in times of private reflection, and in informal gatherings of friends and family members. There were also different kinds of consolers: clerical and lay, male and female, well educated and rustic. These consolers sought to reframe the experience of pain and loss through verbal remedies in a way that made this experience both plausible and endurable. The more sophisticated of these verbal remedies were informed by a complicated mixture of Christian theology and pagan philosophy, as had always been the case in the West.Footnote ⁹ In the Age of Reform, this mixture only grew more complicated as competing Christian confessions began to emerge with competing Christian consolations. In my previous scholarship, I have examined these competing consolations in detail;Footnote ¹⁰ here I am interested in the phenomenon of consolation itself and its overall cultural impact on the Age of Reform and beyond.

By referring to the Age of Reform as an Age of Consolation I am not seeking to claim that all people in all places and from all ranks of society were equally engaged in the kind of verbal solace I am exploring in this article. I am not claiming that Lucas Geizkofler was a spiritual Everyman. Some, perhaps many, sought solace through other means, including magic and various folk remedies.Footnote ¹¹ Much of the evidence for the practice of verbal consolation, especially among laypeople, comes from towns and cities, from members of the merchant and professional classes, such as Lucas Geizkofler, who made up a relatively small portion of the overall population. Still, while Geizkofler was not a spiritual Everyman, he does represent an important and growing group of people in the Age of Reform who, owing to their education, religious commitment, and positions of influence, did a great deal to promote the cause of reform. The evidence of such people's engagement in verbal consolation may be found especially in various extant ego-documents,Footnote ¹² which became increasingly plentiful from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. When this evidence is coupled with the unprecedented number of works of consolation that appeared in the same period, along with the myriad references to lay consolation among different socio-economic groups in various clerical sources (see below), one soon has sufficient warrant for viewing consolation as a distinctive mark of the Age of Reform.

Of course, every age of human history is an age of consolation, for in every age human beings must contend with the pain caused by misfortune and death. When Geizkofler sought to console his wife via letter, he was also engaging in an ancient practice. The effort to comfort oneself or others through words is as old as literate humanity, predating even Homer.Footnote ¹³ The practice grows out of the human desire to mitigate pain and to manage strong emotions, but also out of the human need for meaning, especially amidst the chaos unleashed by suffering that can suggest there is none.Footnote ¹⁴ Consolation has a rich history in the West, numbering among its masters in the ancient and late antique periods Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Cicero, Cyprian, Ambrose, Jerome, and Boethius. Although not as widespread in the Middle Ages as in the ancient period,Footnote ¹⁵ the practice continued.Footnote ¹⁶ Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy was well known at court in the Carolingian period, owing especially to the efforts of Alcuin of York. It was reproduced, glossed, and translated throughout the Middle Ages.Footnote ¹⁷ We also have letters of consolation from Alcuin.Footnote ¹⁸

Thus, verbal consolation clearly persisted from the ancient period to the Age of Reform. However, there are good reasons for concluding that it was far less common in, say, the year 1000, than in 1500 or 1600.Footnote ¹⁹ The vast majority of the population in 1000 was illiterate, far more so than in Geizkofler's day, and preaching in the vernacular was rare. Religious life centered on ritual and ceremony, and most people must have looked to these for solace in the midst of adversity.Footnote ²⁰ Words were part of medieval ceremony, but they were not the main focus; ritualized action was. The extant works of consolation in this period stem from elites, whether lay or clerical, and these works are not especially plentiful. The literary evidence for verbal consolation during the Carolingian Renaissance, a highpoint of literary production in the Middle Ages, amounts to eleven letters, three poems, and six treatises, less than the total number of extant editions of one work of consolation by Martin Luther (see below).Footnote ²¹ Even if one allows for the likely possibility that some medieval consolation literature has been lost or remains undiscovered,Footnote ²² it is still safe to conclude that there was something unique about the flowering of such literature and its concomitant practices in the Age of Reform. The ubiquity of verbal consolation in this period was without precedent.

This flowering began, slowly, through various consolatory efforts in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. One thinks of the letters of Peter the Venerable in which he sought to provide solace to Heloise upon the death of Abelard. These efforts also include sermons by Bernard of Clairvaux and spiritual treatises by Aelred of Rievaulx.Footnote ²³ The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) encouraged the growth of an alternative kind of verbal consolation aimed especially at the laity, sacramental confession, which sought to alleviate a different kind of distress: a guilty conscience. It had a profound effect on the shape of late medieval piety.Footnote ²⁴ Important works of consolation by Renaissance humanists such as Petrarch, Erasmus, and Thomas More also come to mind,Footnote ²⁵ as do works by late medieval mystics, theologians, and reformers such as Meister Eckhart, Johannes von Dambach, Thomas à Kempis, and the doctor consolatorius par excellence of the period, Jean Gerson.Footnote ²⁶ The latter's works were crucial to the growth of the ars moriendi, which also encouraged verbal consolation.Footnote ²⁷ (Such consolation was administered by priests in the context of extreme unction and by laypeople outside of last rites.)Footnote ²⁸ Additionally, we know that monastics engaged in the practice of verbal consolation with one another and with the laypeople to whom they ministered. Late medieval laypeople also consoled one another via letter.Footnote ²⁹ As we will see, verbal consolation increased dramatically in the early modern period owing to the influence of the Protestant and Catholic reformations, a fact that is crucial to the argument of this article. In the Age of Reform there was a growing preoccupation with verbal solace that reached its high point right around Geizkofler's lifetime.

Consolation via sacraments and ceremony obviously continued in the Age of Reform, providing an important context for the verbal consolation I am examining, although this context varied greatly from one expression of Christianity to another after Protestantism was on the scene. Geizkofler makes specific reference to the rhythm of the liturgical year in his letter to his wife, and as a Lutheran he no doubt had the rituals of private confession and the Lord's Supper in mind. Not all Protestants shared this liturgical and sacramental context. But many, especially in urban areas, did share a piety that relied on words for solace and instruction, something one can also find among early modern Catholics.Footnote ³⁰ It should also be noted that images, in many cases with accompanying texts, were important in conveying solace to the afflicted in the Age of Reform, but they fall beyond my purview in this article.Footnote ³¹

To refer to the Age of Reform as an Age of Consolation is to run counter to at least one dominant scholarly interpretation of the character and legacy of the late medieval and early modern Christianization campaign. While there have been many ways of understanding this character and legacy in the last several decades, one of the most important has focused on the theme of discipline and its significance for the eventual emergence of modernity and the modern state. One immediately thinks of the “Confessionalization Thesis” developed by Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling in conversation with the earlier work of Gerhard Oestreich. This thesis has been hegemonic in Reformation studies until very recently.Footnote ³² It holds that the Christian confessions that emerged in the wake of the Protestant Reformation helped to promote the social discipline that was essential to the formation of the early modern state. The clergy and various temporal elites—the “moral police”—utilized mechanisms such as church visitations, catechesis, and consistories to attempt to plant the defining beliefs and practices of their competing confessions in the hearts and minds of their contemporaries. This process, in which a new kind of intellectual, social, and moral discipline was so central, gradually encompassed all of society, first leading to its sacralization, and then, eventually, to its secularization.Footnote ³³

Philip Gorski has written similarly about how the Protestant Reformation unleashed a “disciplinary revolution” that contributed to the rise of the state, especially in Calvinist lands. According to him, Calvinism invented “a panoply of disciplining techniques and strategies” in which the “technology of observation” played a defining role. (The Genevan consistory is one example of this technology.) The disciplinary regimen and regime were gradually absorbed into the structures of the early modern state, granting to it unparalleled power over its subjects.Footnote ³⁴

Foucault figures prominently in Gorki's analysis,Footnote ³⁵ owing to his work on various kinds of “panoptic” gazes and disciplinary efforts in the Age of Reform. Foucault also interpreted institutions such as sacramental confession as expressions of “pastoral power” that robbed laypeople of their native freedom and subjected them to the clergy, who supplied laypeople with their very sense of identity and through which the clergy dominated them.Footnote ³⁶ Although not a Foucauldian, David Sabean has likewise maintained that state officials in the early modern period saw in devotional literature—specifically, literature on preparation for participation in the Eucharist—a means of encouraging a sense of interiority in their subjects that would render them more susceptible to state discipline.Footnote ³⁷ Approaching the early modern Christianization campaign from a different angle, Theodore Dwight Bozeman has depicted Puritanism as a “Disciplinary Religion” that so encumbered the original Protestant Gospel with demands for moral progress that it failed to console and instead contributed to an Antinomian backlash.Footnote ³⁸

Less interested in the growth of the modern state than in modernity itself, especially its secularity, in the 1980s Jean Delumeau sought to explain the de-Christianization of Europe as an understandable response to the allegedly warped Christianization of the late medieval and early modern period. Delumeau argued that Catholic leaders utilized the disciplinary mechanism of sacramental confession to instill a hyper-Augustinian Christianity in the masses, who were taught to fear God, themselves, and life in this world. Protestants only made things worse through their emphasis on human bondage to sin.Footnote ³⁹ Also in the 1980s, Gerald Strauss argued that Protestant pedagogy and catechesis, which he believed were designed to produce obedience to governing authorities above all else, largely failed in their disciplinary goals, for the common folk preferred their own traditional and quasi-pagan religion to the austere Lutheran creed.Footnote ⁴⁰

More recently, Susan Karant-Nunn has examined the reformation of ritual and emotion, respectively, among early modern Christians. She has situated the former study within the literature on confessionalization and social discipline, and argued that Protestant attempts to reform religious rituals should be interpreted as a sincere but ultimately flawed (and failed) effort to discipline the masses. This effort left the masses with a sense of impotence before an increasingly remote God and an increasingly powerful state.Footnote ⁴¹ In her work on emotion, Karant-Nunn draws appreciatively on Delumeau's thesisFootnote ⁴² and interprets Protestant efforts to teach early modern Europeans new “emotional scripts” as contributing to the suppression of emotion, especially among Calvinists.Footnote ⁴³

While these scholars have approached the Age of Reform from different vantage points and have sought to contribute to different bodies of scholarship, they may all be seen as advocates of what one might term the “Discipline Paradigm” or the “Discipline Thesis.” This perspective views the Age of Reform primarily through the lens of discipline because it is convinced that the Age of Reform was fundamentally about discipline. Scott Dixon has recently expressed this perspective well: “The Reformation, after all, was in essence a campaign to impose a form of Christian order on the world.” Discipline was the most important tool in this campaign, and thus, according to Dixon, historians have been understandably “preoccupied” with it.Footnote ⁴⁴

The “Discipline Thesis” is compelling; there is a lot of truth to it, and it has been propounded by some of the most creative and talented scholars of the last couple of decades. The thesis has greatly expanded our understanding of the Age of Reform and its legacy in the West, and it has exposed the narrowness and naïveté of many past interpretations. It has also attended to the nameless masses that had been ignored in much previous scholarship. The late medieval and early modern Christianization campaigns clearly sought to promote and enforce greater order and conformity. The result of these efforts was the creation of numerous means by which human beings were disciplined inwardly and outwardly, by their rulers and by themselves, to become dutiful members of various Christian churches and obedient citizens in the emerging early modern states. After all, obedience is central to Christianity, and many contemporaries, both lay and clerical, saw it as a good thing, even as many also resisted it, at least in the form advocated by their leaders.Footnote ⁴⁵

The story I wish to tell about consolation can be fitted within the “Discipline Paradigm.” Geizkofler was exercising a form of discipline with himself and his wife that was the result of training and instruction from the clergy. He conformed quite well to the confessionalizing designs of his leaders. He can even be viewed as a member of the “moral police” that sought to promote and impose these designs. But Geizkofler also challenges the “Discipline Thesis.”

All large interpretive paradigms and theses are fallible; all have blind spots.Footnote ⁴⁶ The major failing of the “Discipline Paradigm” is that it can be quite one-sided. As I have suggested, those who support it typically have eyes for discipline and control in the reforming activities of the period and not for much else.Footnote ⁴⁷ They can also have a narrow and largely negative view of Age-of-Reform discipline, viewing it primarily as a species of coercion or even punishment.Footnote ⁴⁸ Relatedly, the discipline perspective tends to have a reductionistic view of religion—religion functions especially as an instrument of social control.Footnote ⁴⁹ Recent concerns about the way the Confessionalization Thesis has viewed religion may be extended to the “Discipline Thesis” as a whole. Thomas A. Brady Jr. has observed, “Ironically, the inability to comprehend religion, the chief marker of confessionalization, as a set of coherent practices has proved the Achilles heel of the confessionalization thesis, particularly in its original vision.”Footnote ⁵⁰ John O'Malley has similarly remarked on the inability of the Confessionalization Thesis to take seriously “religion in and of itself—religion not as a political or social force but as a yearning for the transcendent or an experience of it.” He has also asked, with respect to figures such as François de Sales and Teresa of Avila and their religious experiences, “These individuals and phenomena can be studied from many perspectives, but is it not incumbent upon us to study them for what they head-on purported to be about, the sacred?”Footnote ⁵¹ Finally, proponents of the “Discipline Thesis” have at times had a reductionistic view of human beings as creatures that exercise power, succumb to power, or resist power. Foucault is but one source among many for the “Discipline Thesis,” but his influence on it is unmistakable.

Advocates of the “Discipline Thesis” have understandably situated the Age of Reform in a larger narrative about the growth of modernity, especially the growth of the modern state and the attitudes and behaviors that became necessary to form and support it. Again, despite its blind spots, this has been a worthy project. However, there are other ways of understanding the Age of Reform and its contribution to modernity. There are other narratives within which one may place the Age of Reform, such as the narrative about consolation that I have begun to sketch above. By drawing our attention to this narrative, I hope to show another side of Age-of-Reform discipline and, indeed, another side of human existence in the past. My goal is to help us achieve a more balanced and complete understanding of the period as a whole.Footnote ⁵² I also hope to show how Age-of-Reform consolatory practices contributed directly to an important development in human self-understanding that has significantly shaped modern existence in the West. I will return to an examination of this development later in the article. Permit me now to move from these reflections on discipline and to turn to a brief examination of the evidence for the ubiquity of consolation in the Age of Reform, and thus to support my foregoing assertions about its cultural importance.

III. The Ubiquity of Consolation in the Age of Reform

It is not difficult to establish this ubiquity, especially after the advent of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century, although, we have seen, there is plenty of manuscript evidence, as well, beginning already in the High Middle Ages.Footnote ⁵³ It is a well-known fact that works of devotion were the most popular form of printed material in the late medieval and early modern periods,Footnote ⁵⁴ and many of these works can be classified as works of consolation. Martin Luther provides a good case in point. His pastoral writings made him into an early modern publishing sensation, not his controversial works.Footnote ⁵⁵ Luther's famous Ninety-Five Theses is extant in just a handful of editions, while A Sermon on Preparing to Die (1519), a vernacular work of consolation, is extant in twenty-four editions; his other pastoral writings are similarly well attested.Footnote ⁵⁶

Luther was by far the most popular author of his day,Footnote ⁵⁷ but other clerical authors produced individual works of consolation that outsold his. The Augsburg Lutheran reformer Urbanus Rhegius authored a pamphlet entitled Soul-Medicine for the Healthy and the Sick in these Dangerous Times (1529) that went through 121 editions in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and was translated from the original High German into Low German, Danish, French, Icelandic, Latin, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, and Czech.Footnote ⁵⁸ It also influenced works of devotion in English.Footnote ⁵⁹ (Geizkofler, who lived in Augsburg, almost certainly knew this work.) Other important Lutheran works of consolation—or works of devotion that contained significant treatments of consolation—include Caspar Huberinus's How One Should Console a Dying Person (1529; thirty-eight editions), Johannes Spangenberg's A New Booklet of Consolation (1542; sixteen editions), Michael Bock's Little Garden of Spices for Sick Souls (1562; twenty editions), and Johannes Habermann's Prayer Booklet (1597; fifty-nine editions).Footnote ⁶⁰

Turning to Reformed Protestantism on the continent, some scholars have argued that consolation and its attendant affectivity were lacking in this version of Christianity. They have maintained that the teaching of correct doctrine, even at the deathbed, was the Reformed pastor's primary concern.Footnote ⁶¹ But other scholars have found quite a strong emphasis on affective piety and solace in the relevant devotional literature, pointing to works of consolation by Huldrych Zwingli and, especially, Heinrich Bullinger, among others.Footnote ⁶² Zwingli's famous Plague Song (1519) is extant in nine editions, Bullinger's Instruction of the Sick (1544) in six editions.Footnote ⁶³ While Reformed Protestants on the continent did not produce as many works of consolation as Lutherans, we should avoid concluding that consolation was somehow foreign to the religion of Zwingli and Calvin and their followers. We need more research on this front. There was nothing in Reformed Protestantism itself that militated against the ministry of consolation. English Protestantism makes this point very clearly.Footnote ⁶⁴ Thomas Becon's Sick Mans Salve (1553) is extant in some thirty editions,Footnote ⁶⁵ John Norden's A Pensive Mans Practice (1623) in forty-four editions,Footnote ⁶⁶ William Cowper's A Conduit of Comfort (1606) in twelve editions,Footnote ⁶⁷ and Lewis Bayly's Practice of Pietie (1613), which contains numerous consoling sayings, in over fifty editions.Footnote ⁶⁸ These works were among the most popular of the day.

We have fewer extant works of consolation from the Radical Reformation, but Anabaptists and Spiritualists still contributed to this literature. Caspar von Schwenckfeld authored a number of letters and works of consolation, two of which appeared together in the late 1530s: Consolation for One Who Stands Under the Cross and A Useful Book of Consolation for All Sick, Afflicted, and Imprisoned People. This two-part work is extant in eight editions.Footnote ⁶⁹ Menno Simons also authored letters of consolation, although they were not published in his lifetime.Footnote ⁷⁰

Catholics produced numerous important works of consolation in the Age of Reform. One thinks of the tremendous growth of manuals for confession that appeared in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council, each of which contained sections on consolation. The same was true for the treatments of unction in pastoral manuals.Footnote ⁷¹ One should also mention Jean Gerson's Work in Three Parts (manuscript circa 1404, incunabulum 1467), which is extant in twenty-seven incunabular editions. Gerson wrote the work for simple priests to assist them in the care of souls.Footnote ⁷² Part three of the work contains his famous “On the Art of Dying,” which played such a pivotal role in the late medieval ars moriendi movement.Footnote ⁷³ (Parts one and two deal with the Ten Commandments and Confession, respectively.)Footnote ⁷⁴ Catholics produced other notable works of consolation,Footnote ⁷⁵ but arguably the most important treatments of the subject appeared in immensely popular works of devotion such as Of the Imitation and Christ (manuscript 1420s; incunabulum 1471), Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises (1541), and Frances de Sales's Introduction to the Devout Life (1609).Footnote ⁷⁶ Each of these works is extant in myriad editions and in multiple languages. (Of the Imitation and Christ is extant in circa 800 manuscript editions and circa 740 print editions.)Footnote ⁷⁷ Turning from manuscript or printed material to Catholic practice, John O'Malley has argued that the ministry of consolation was central to Jesuit self-understanding, especially in administering the Sacrament of Penance to laypeople, which lay at the heart of their care of souls.Footnote ⁷⁸ In point of fact, clergy from each of the Christian confessions claimed that consolation was central to their ministry, asserting that the ability to provide solace to troubled souls was the greatest gift a pastor or priest could have.Footnote ⁷⁹

There is also abundant evidence of a vibrant ministry of consolation among laypeople in the Age of Reform, especially as we approach the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, although there is evidence of this ministry in the later Middle Ages, as well (see above). Many clerical works of consolation were written to and for laypeople, in part because the authors knew that there were not enough pastors to go around and therefore laypeople had to become their own consolers. This was true of Urbanus Rhegius's Soul Medicine, Heinrich Bullinger's Instruction of the Sick, and Thomas Becon's Sick Mans Salve. Footnote ⁸⁰ The latter work is especially interesting. It tells the story of how a layman sought and received solace in his illness from his friends via holy “conferences” in his home. Becon, a pastor, has laypeople provide all of this solace.Footnote ⁸¹ Only after the sick man dies do his friends seek out a pastor to preach a funeral sermon.Footnote ⁸² Becon also includes prayers that laypeople could use as they attended to the sick and dying, something one also finds in Lewis Bayly's popular Practice of Pietie.Footnote ⁸³ Lutheran church ordinances called for pastors to train laypeople to minister to the sick and the dying,Footnote ⁸⁴ and Dutch Protestants even created a special lay office to carry out the ministry of consolation—the ziekentrooster.Footnote ⁸⁵ Other sources reveal Lutheran midwives comforting pregnant women,Footnote ⁸⁶ Reformed Protestant deacons visiting and consoling the sick,Footnote ⁸⁷ Lutheran laypeople singing hymns to console the sick and dying,Footnote ⁸⁸ Anabaptist laity consoling their co-religionists in the face of exile and persecution,Footnote ⁸⁹ and Catholic laypeople practicing the ars moriendi with fellow members of confraternities.Footnote ⁹⁰

We know from post-mortem inventories that lay urban dwellers owned works of consolation.Footnote ⁹¹ If a layperson could read, his literary diet was comprised almost exclusively of such works, and it is likely that he—or she—was reading the works to others. But laypeople were not simply consumers of such works; they also produced their own. One of the earliest Protestant works of consolation was written by a layperson, Nuremberg's city council secretary, Lazarus Spengler, who, because of his public support for Luther, had been threatened with excommunication along with the Wittenberg reformer. The work was entitled A Consoling Christian Instruction and Medicine in All Adversities (1521).Footnote ⁹² Protestant women also wrote such works. Strasbourg's Katharina Schutz Zell, an eclectic evangelical who drew on Lutheran, Zwinglian, Spiritualist, and Catholic sources to develop her own theology, wrote a pamphlet entitled To the Suffering Christ-believing Women of the Community of Kentzingen (1524) in which she seeks to console her evangelical sisters whose husbands had been banished from the city.Footnote ⁹³ Many lay ego-documents, like Lucas Geizkofler's letter to his grieving wife, are also replete with consolation,Footnote ⁹⁴ as are lay letters written during outbreaks of plague.Footnote ⁹⁵ We also have diaries and autobiographies from across the confessional spectrum, many of which contain expressions of self-consolation.Footnote ⁹⁶ Some can even be humorous. When the sixteenth-century Catholic diarist Hermann von Weinsberg suffered a hernia, he consoled himself by interpreting it as a penance that would reduce his time in purgatory.Footnote ⁹⁷ (I am sure the hernia was not funny to him.)

An important feature of consolation literature should also be noted, namely, the great amount of borrowing of sources between the Christian confessions, especially among Protestants. As Alec Ryrie has put it, Protestants were “devotionally omnivorous.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Catholics were less so. From the later Middle Ages forward, there was a growing expectation among devout laypeople that the ability to console themselves and their loved ones was simply part of what it meant to be a good Christian.Footnote ⁹⁹ Devout laypeople, especially devout Protestant laypeople, were quite willing to cross confessional boundaries in order to carry out this ministry of self and neighbor consolation.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Given the ubiquity of consolation in the Age of Reform, it is rather curious that scholars have largely ignored it in their overall treatments of the period and its legacy. To my knowledge, no one has asked larger questions about the cultural significance of consolation in the Age of Reform and beyond. We do not have anything approaching a synthetic treatment of consolation itself in the Age of Reform.Footnote ¹⁰¹ We have studies of consolation in the works of specific reformers, especially Luther,Footnote ¹⁰² and specific confessions,Footnote ¹⁰³ but not for the Age of Reform as a whole. Perhaps scholars are not fully aware of this ubiquity, or perhaps they view consolation as a “soft” topic, much as they used to see healing and emotion, both of which are now important subfields in their own right. Or maybe scholars consider the study of consolation to be narrow or even naive, for it can certainly seem Pollyannaish to make so much of solace in an age of such cruelty, hatred, and oppression. But the evidence for the ubiquity of consolation remains, demanding attention and interpretation.

IV. Reasons for the Growth of Verbal Consolation in the Age of Reform

How may we account for the flowering of verbal consolation in the Age of Reform? The presence of myriad forms of suffering, such as plague, famine, and war, along with the generally trying circumstances of everyday life in pre-modern Europe, is certainly part of the answer. In the Age of Reform, one out of every four or five infants died in their first year of life and only half reached the age of ten.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Geizkofler's experience of loss was quite common. Contemporary medicine did little to help those who survived as they faced the constant threat of disease. Clearly, there were many reasons to be anxious in the Age of Reform, especially when misfortune was interpreted as a sign of either divine wrath or demonic activity. The fact that so many people turned to consolation via words may be attributed to the so-called “rise of laity” in the later Middle Ages, and the concomitant and well-attested growth of lay literacy and lay devotion—words were taking on an increasingly important role in lay piety.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ It seems that consolation via book, sermon, letter, or song created a thirst for more of the same. That is, it seems that the growth of verbal consolation, especially in the form of printed materials, was, at least in part, a response to real demand.

The Latin Church encouraged the growth of verbal consolation in a number of ways. As mentioned above, in order to combat heresy and to promote piety, the church made annual sacramental confession obligatory for all Christians at the Fourth Lateran Council. Canon 21 of this landmark gathering calls for the confessor to be “discerning and prudent, so that like a skilled doctor he may pour wine and oil over the wounds of the injured one.” The priest is to make a careful inquiry into the penitent's sins and their circumstances, “so that he may prudently discern what sort of advice he ought to give and what remedy to apply, using various means to heal the sick person.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ While actual practice lagged far behind this ideal,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ these stipulations did create a new set of expectations for the faithful priest, and being able to offer solace and instruction through words was central to them.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Some of the most important theologians and preachers of the later Middle Ages also stressed the importance of consolation in their works and sermons, among them Jean Gerson, Johannes Paltz, and Johannes von Staupitz, Luther's spiritual mentor. Berndt Hamm has shown that these figures advocated a form of pastoral care that stressed the nearness of divine grace and the presence of the suffering Christ in the lives of believers.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ As is well known, this emphasis on the suffering humanity of Christ was a hallmark of late medieval devotion, and it too encouraged the growth of consolation. Rachel Fulton and others have demonstrated that the origins of Passion piety may be traced back to the prayers of St. Anselm at the beginning of the Age of Reform, among other sources.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Europeans did not have to wait for Martin Luther to discover a God of mercy, compassion, and grace; they heard sermons and read devotional literature about this God before Luther appeared on the scene, even as they also heard plenty about the divine Judge. Late medieval Christianity was a religion rich in consolation.

The Protestant and Catholic Reformations greatly accelerated the growth of verbal consolation, although as I have just emphasized, in the case of Protestants, this growth should not be viewed as a new development, as if Protestants invented solace and late medieval Christianity only fostered guilt and anxiety.Footnote ¹¹¹ Still, this is how many early Protestants saw things. Theologically speaking, the Protestant Reformation began as a quest for a new kind of consolation. After Luther discovered (or invented) this evangelical solace, he saw proclaiming the gospel of unconditional grace through faith to his contemporaries as his top priority. Many found his message appealing, especially as they suffered in soul or body. In 1520, having found great solace in Luther's writings for his own Anfechtungen, Albrecht Dürer praised the Wittenberg reformer as “a Christian man who helped me out of great distress.”Footnote ¹¹² As was true of many evangelical lay priests, Dürer then sought to spread Luther's consolation to others. Luther did a great deal to accelerate the growth of verbal consolation through his preaching and writing. As we have seen, he was the most popular author of his day and his works of devotion and consolation easily outsold his controversial works. Here the printing press was absolutely central; it was essential to the flowering of verbal consolation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Catholics and other Protestants responded with their own competing consolation campaigns. The leaders of the Christian confessions believed that if they could persuade the laity to cope with misfortune according to Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed Protestant, or Anabaptist prescriptions, respectively, they would have gone a long way toward securing the laity's allegiance to their version of Christianity, thus ensuring the salvation of lay souls. In this way, competing versions of consolation contributed significantly to the process of confessionalization.Footnote ¹¹³ There was a lot of common ground between the competing consolation campaigns, for each confession stressed that God was sovereign over suffering, that the Christian had to face suffering with faith and patience, and that God accomplished much good in the Christian's life through suffering, conforming her to the image of Christ. Every confession also taught that Christ was present in the Christian's suffering. But there was also a lot of disagreement, especially regarding what constituted true suffering and true consolation. Radicals accused other Christians of being unwilling to suffer persecution for the sake of the Gospel, while magisterial Protestants accused Catholics and Radicals of engaging in self-made suffering.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Catholics turned to saints and sacramentals for consolation, while Protestants rejected the same. Catholics said suffering was a means of penance; Protestants insisted it was not.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Lutherans and Catholics looked to clerical absolution for solace; other Protestants said it was a fraud. And so on. All the while, each Christian confession continued to churn out numerous works of consolation and to encourage various consolatory practices that promised true solace vis-à-vis other confessions. One overall effect of these competing consolation campaigns was to raise lay expectations of consolation, for never before had so much solace been promised to the laity, and never before had so much been at stake in persuading the laity to suffer “correctly.”Footnote ¹¹⁶

There is another cause of the flowering of verbal consolation that relates especially to Protestants. Many Protestants had a sacramental view of scripture, that is, they saw it not simply as divine revelation, but also as a means of divine grace.Footnote ¹¹⁷ For most Protestants, grace was tied to the Word and therefore to human words that sought to convey the Word—verbal consolation was essential to Protestant consolation.Footnote ¹¹⁸ One sees this very clearly in Becon's Sick Mans Salve.Footnote ¹¹⁹ During the conference with the sick man that Becon narrates, the book of Job comes up for discussion. One of the lay consolers takes Job's friends to task for initially sitting with the afflicted saint for a week in silence (Job 2:13). The lay consoler exclaims, “by the space of vii. dayes, [they] spake not one comfortable worde unto hym.”Footnote ¹²⁰ By way of contrast, the lay consolers in this work set to consoling their sick friend with “comfortable words” as soon as they enter his house. In a sense, Protestant consolers, with their sacramental view of the Word, took on the role of the priestly confessor in Canon 21 of the Fourth Lateran Council. Armed with the sacramental Word, they sought to become doctors of souls, both their own and their neighbors’.

V. Assessing the Efficacy of Verbal Consolation in the Age of Reform

Did any of this verbal consolation work? Did it help? Some have suggested that it did not, certainly not very often, and this is why there was so much consolation literature, especially among Protestants. Protestants deprived their contemporaries of the ritual means of consolation that provided at least some solace, along with the promises of miraculous healing contained in traditional Christianity, leaving them more anxious than ever.Footnote ¹²¹ On this interpretation, Protestants created the anxiety that they then tried feverishly but unsuccessfully to relieve. According to Delumeau, Catholics did the same through a similarly obsessive emphasis on guilt.Footnote ¹²² It is of course true that the competing Christian confessions helped to create the fear and discomfort that their competing consolations sought to ease. Am I sufficiently sorrowful for my sins? Have I performed enough penance to appease the wrathful divine Judge? Do I have sufficient faith to receive free grace? Am I among the elect? Am I truly willing to die for my faith? The clergy placed these and other anxiety-producing questions in the minds of their contemporaries, believing they were divinely authorized to do so.

But here one should mention an extremely important “missed opportunity” for the production of such anxiety that should temper our interpretation of efforts to discipline the laity in the Age of Reform. In keeping with medieval precedent,Footnote ¹²³ theologians and pastors regularly chose not to interpret suffering as a divine punishment for sin, or not only as such punishment. They still attributed the fact of suffering to original sin, and there are plenty of examples of this view in the sources, even as there are plenty of examples of specific forms of affliction being tied to specific sins, especially in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.Footnote ¹²⁴ Some rather brutal “consolation” could be the result of this latter connection.Footnote ¹²⁵ But what is really striking is how frequently the sin explanation is listed along with other explanations of misfortune or avoided altogether. There are in fact numerous examples of clerical authors insisting that suffering is not a punishment for sin, at least not for the faithful. Protestants, especially, reasoned that Christ had already born all such punishment on their behalf, and therefore suffering could only be for their edification.Footnote ¹²⁶ In many ways, the whole point of the Christian consolation literature was to persuade its hearers and readers that their affliction was not a punishment meted out by an angry deity; rather, it was their heavenly Father's means of preparing His children for heaven—this is how the consolers sought to reframe the experience of pain and loss to render it bearable and even meaningful.Footnote ¹²⁷ This is how Lucas Geizkofler interpreted the death of his son. In his letter to his wife, he seeks to persuade her that their loss is not a punishment for sin, even though he concedes that he and his wife deserve such punishment. David Lederer and Jeremy Schmidt have found the same emphasis on consoling approaches to misfortune in their important work on early modern madness and melancholy, respectively.Footnote ¹²⁸ Most scholars have overlooked this emphasis in the sources, perhaps because they are difficult to encompass within the “Discipline Paradigm.”

It is difficult to know if verbal consolation worked, or if some versions of it worked better than others, because we cannot peer directly into the souls of people in the past.Footnote ¹²⁹ Those who think they can declare with confidence that one form of consolation worked better than another, or that consolation did not work at all, typically reveal more about their own religious or philosophical commitments than they do about human experience in the Age of Reform. Consolation refers not only to a collection of written works and to a set of practices, but also to an emotional state, the state of being consoled, and this feeling is difficult for the historian to access.Footnote ¹³⁰ Even ego-documents such as Geizkofler's letter need to be treated with caution, as they are mediated sources that do not provide direct access to the souls of the people who created them.Footnote ¹³¹ Still, I do not believe that we are completely cut off from human emotional experience in the past,Footnote ¹³² and I also think there are reasons for concluding that the various verbal consolations provided comfort to Christians, at least some of the time.

This seems to have been the case with Geizkofler. He says it consoled him to consider that his misfortune was not an expression of divine wrath—that it was actually meant for good. We must appreciate what a powerful insight this was for many people in the Age of Reform, perhaps especially because there were so many reasons for them to conclude the opposite during this time. Regardless of how one might evaluate this insight today, it seems to have worked for Geizkofler, and he thought it would help his wife. Along with his letter, and in place of a “sweet unleavened Easter cake,” Geizkofler sent a theological treatise on the merit of Christ to his wife that he had prepared himself. He again decouples misfortune from divine wrath, showing how important this view was for him. Geizkofler also mentions an additional source of solace. He says that he has drawn great consolation from the belief that Christ the Bridegroom has joined Himself in an indivisible union with every Christian soul, come what may.Footnote ¹³³ Geizkofler commends this insight to his wife, observing that in their love for each other they are able to experience something of the “fervent love” Christ has for souls, even in the midst of their loss.Footnote ¹³⁴ (Especially because Geizkofler was a Lutheran, one cannot help but hear in these lines echoes of Luther's “wonderful exchange” from The Freedom of the Christian.)Footnote ¹³⁵ It is plausible that such a perspective could provide comfort to Age-of-Reform Christians in the midst of distress. As Alec Ryrie has argued in his magisterial Being Protestant, even anxious Puritans seem to have derived some measure of solace from the works of consolation that were available to them.Footnote ¹³⁶ My sense is that this was true of Christians from all confessions.

VI. Consolation and the Interpretation of the Age of Reform

How should we assess the overall cultural impact of this flowering of consolation on the Age of Reform? How did it shape the human beings who practiced and experienced it? Beyond providing them with some comfort, did it influence them in any other significant ways? The cultural effects of consolation are difficult to measure—there are no court records or church visitation reports to document it, which is perhaps one reason why historians have paid less attention to it. One must proceed more inferentially and study sources that can be difficult to access, such as ego-documents, many of which are still hidden away in archives.Footnote ¹³⁷

There are clues in Geizkofler's letter to his wife about one possible way verbal consolation shaped those who engaged in it: the practice encouraged the growth of a certain kind of inwardness.Footnote ¹³⁸ Here it is helpful to interact with the work of Charles Taylor and his efforts to understand the “making of modern identity.”Footnote ¹³⁹ My suggestion is that the practice of consolation had an important influence on the self-understanding of those who experienced it, that it promoted the kind of inwardness that Taylor has examined in Sources of the Self. I think that at least some aspects of modern identity may be traced back, in part, to the flowering of consolation in the Age of Reform. Allow me to sketch out the broad contours of what I have in mind with this claim.

First, I wish to make it clear that I am not seeking to contribute to a teleological narrative about the manifest destiny and moral superiority of a modern introspective and autonomous (male) self. That narrative is deeply problematic and grew out of the social and political needs of its day,Footnote ¹⁴⁰ even as the current narrative of the non-existent self or of constantly shifting selves serves similar needs in our own day.Footnote ¹⁴¹ We should be wary of accepting either narrative uncritically. While the enormous literature on the history of the self contains crucial disagreements about the definition of the self,Footnote ¹⁴² including whether there is such a thing as “the self” (as opposed to a mere sense of self),Footnote ¹⁴³ there is widespread agreement that something important happened in the evolution of human self-understanding in the Age of Reform, at least for a portion of the population, and that a new kind of inwardness, or at least a new value placed on inwardness,Footnote ¹⁴⁴ was central to this evolution. I am seeking to draw attention to one understudied and important facilitator of this inwardness.

According to Taylor, people in the modern West have a sense of themselves as beings that have selves in the same way they have heads, hands, and feet.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Inwardness, the sense of having inner depths or a private inward space, and of being aware of having this sense, is a key feature of modern self-understanding for Taylor. He traces the growth of this inwardness from its origins in Augustinian “radical reflexivity,”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ through its intensification and spread in the late medieval and early modern periods,Footnote ¹⁴⁷ and finally to its secularization in the modern period, when, according to him, human beings became enclosed in their own reflexivity, trapped in a never-ending quest for meaning and authenticity.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ While Taylor mentions the role of Jesuit and Puritan self-examination in the growth of inwardness,Footnote ¹⁴⁹ he makes relatively little of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in this part of his analysis. He has more to say about the Age of Reform as a whole in A Secular Age, asserting that German mysticism and Devotio moderna, along with private confession and the ars moriendi, also contributed to the growth of inwardness.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ But in neither work does he refer to the larger flowering of verbal consolation that we have explored above. I assume that he was unaware of it. The Age of Reform remains for Taylor an age of anxiety that was characterized by a lamentable effort to Christianize the masses inwardly and outwardly through largely coercive means.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Taylor has sympathies with the “Discipline Thesis.”Footnote ¹⁵²

While brilliant in so many ways, there are problems with Taylor's analysis of inwardness, especially from a historian's perspective. He has been accused of constructing the kind of teleological narrative I eschew above and of failing to appreciate the myriad ways that human beings have formed senses of identity in the past.Footnote ¹⁵³ This is an important criticism,Footnote ¹⁵⁴ although I think that Taylor is still on to something important with respect to at least one dominant version of self-understanding in the West. Taylor also seems to imply that inwardness is a uniquely Western phenomenon, especially a uniquely modern Western phenomenon, a perspective that is highly debatable—inwardness may be found outside of the modern West, even as it has a distinctive form and story in the West.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Additionally, Taylor's sources are problematic, something he readily concedes: they do not provide access to the most important driver of change in human self-understanding over time. According to him, that driver is practices, or ideas embedded in practices, including religious practices.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ As is true of most large synthetic works that seek to understand the origins of modernity, Taylor focuses almost exclusively on ideas, largely limiting his analysis to the writings of Descartes, Montaigne, and Locke in his examination of the Age of Reform in Sources of the Self. The references to confession and the ars moriendi in A Secular Age are brief and undeveloped.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ I believe that consolation did more to encourage the growth of inwardness in the Age of Reform than did the writings that Taylor engages, and I think Taylor would agree. After all, many more people practiced verbal consolation than read Descartes.

Consolation was a social practice and embedded within it were key ideas about human identity that shaped people as they engaged in it.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The kind of consolation we have seen in Geizkofler and others both presupposes and encourages the inwardness that Taylor says was so important to the eventual emergence of modern identity in the West. When the clergy consoled the laity, or when they urged the laity to become their own consolers, they were encouraging them to develop a lay version of the radical reflexivity one sees in Augustine's Confessions. The practice of verbal consolation assumes that a human being is a creature with inner depths that can be full of pain and distress, and which therefore must be carefully and individually plumbed if the person is to find the appropriate solace in the midst of suffering. To become a doctor of one's own soul or of one's neighbor's soul is to become a person who believes she and others have such depths. But this practice did not simply assume the existence of these depths; it helped to form, expand, and maintain these depths, even as it sought to convey solace to them. Words—written, spoken, read, heard, and sung—were central to this process of persuading human beings to understand themselves as creatures with inner depths. These depths were frequently referred to as the conscience or the heart.

Consolation clearly promoted a sense of inwardness in those who practiced it, and not just among anxious monks like Luther. Lucas Geizkofler says in his letter to his wife that his grief and extended absence from her, along with his theological reflections on the same, have caused him “to go into myself” (in mich selbs zu gehen). He also says that he has allowed the consolation he has discovered “to impress itself more deeply on my heart” (den angedeuten trost mir etwas tiefer in mein herz einbilden wollen).Footnote ¹⁵⁹ His pain and search for solace caused him to retreat within himself, something he also commends to his wife. Like Augustine, Geizkofler turned inward to be drawn upward to God, although he lacked Augustine's neo-platonic account of this upward drawing.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Geizkofler emphasized instead the reality of the union between Christ and each Christian soul, a perspective that also assumed and encouraged inwardness. As a humanist, Geizkofler had likely learned to retreat into himself through other practices, such as private reading and writing, both of which were essential to the consolation that he practiced with himself and his wife.Footnote ¹⁶¹ (As a humanist, Geizkofler was also likely aware of the antiquity of consolation.) Consolation was but one of several interrelated practices that promoted inwardness in the Age of Reform; it is, however, the least studied among them.

While verbal consolation was not a mass practice, it was much more common than the writing of diaries and autobiographies. Such practices also clearly encouraged the growth of inwardness, and we have several fine treatments of how they did so.Footnote ¹⁶² But these sources do not become plentiful until the seventeenth century.Footnote ¹⁶³ Verbal consolation was also much older than the making of diaries and autobiographies, predating the heyday of these other practices by centuries. Although common to all Christian confessions, verbal consolation had a unique importance among Protestants because it represents what Susan Karant-Nunn has called a “pararitual,” that is, a kind of unofficial ritual that survived the censorship of Protestant authorities and that was able to shape Protestant emotional life in important ways.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

It should be stressed that as Geizkofler sought comfort in his distress, he looked to others for solace, in the first place, God, and more specifically, to the Passion narratives in the sacred Gospels. He also looked to other human beings, including, he tells us, a Jesuit priest in Prague who shared works of the early and medieval Church Fathers with him—these were the sources for his reflections on the “wonderful exchange.” Geizkofler was not an isolated monad; he had a relational sense of self.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ He also did not shun suffering.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Geizkofler was a long way from Taylor's modern “buffered self” that believes it can and must make its own meaning in a closed and meaningless universe, an exercise that, according to Taylor, frequently involves the avoidance of suffering. Geizkofler still had a “porous self.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ And yet he and those like him represent one important step in the contingent historical development of one significant feature of modern identity; as they practiced verbal consolation, people like Geizkofler unwittingly helped to prepare the ground for this identity.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

Geizkofler's practice of consolation can also help us to broaden our understanding of Age-of-Reform discipline. Consolation has its own expansive story that stretches from the ancient world to the modern day. Placing the Age of Reform within this story as one of its most important chapters can reveal dimensions of this Age that the “Discipline Paradigm” either ignores or interprets one-sidedly. The dimensions I have especially in mind include the kind of resourcefulness, compassion, and empathy that people like Lucas Geizkofler displayed as they practiced verbal consolation, along with the version of porous inwardness that they cultivated in the process. This inwardness could function as a convenient tool for church- or state-sponsored coercion, but I hope I have shown that it had other purposes as well. I also have in mind such dimensions as the solace that Geizkofler and his contemporaries seem to have experienced and the yearning for the divine, and thus for meaning, that lay at the heart of their desire for comfort. Finally, I have in mind the way consolation could also provide refuge from the harsher aspects of Age-of-Reform discipline. These aspects of human experience are also an important part of the Age of Reform. To miss them, and the way they challenge and revise the “Discipline Thesis,” is to miss something essential about the Age of Reform and its legacy.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

VII. Consolation and the Legacies of the Age of Reform

If there is anything to Taylor's treatment of modern identity, especially regarding the importance of inwardness to it, and if I am on to anything with these reflections about the connection between the practice of verbal consolation and the growth of inwardness in the Age of Reform, then it would follow that we should pay close attention to what happens to this practice if we want to understand the gradual transition from a porous self to a buffered self in the West. In other words, if we want to gain insight into the secularization of self-understanding in the West as a legacy of the Age of Reform, we should attend closely to the historical development of consolatory practices.

As scholars such as Jan Goldstein have shown, early modern Christian consolation itself became secularized over time, at least among a certain portion of the European population, gradually evolving in some contexts into Freudian psychotherapy, an obvious terminus ad quem for the story I am telling.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ An important part of this story is the gradual decline of belief in things such as heaven, hell, purgatory, the devil, saints, angels, divine judgment, divine grace, miracles, and so on, which were assumed in traditional Christian consolation. The competing versions of consolation in the Age of Reform no doubt contributed to this decline by throwing into doubt so many traditional beliefs and practices and by causing so much conflict about them.

I believe that an unfortunate characteristic of much of this consolation literature also contributed to this decline: Age of Reform consolation frequently made little room for the full-throated biblical lament, and even protest, that one finds in certain of the Psalms (see especially 44, 88, 89). Many Christians were expected to suffer without being able to shake their angry fists at heaven once in a while, which, owing to the psychological burden this created, in time may well have encouraged opposition to Christianity itself.Footnote ¹⁷¹ As Taylor has argued, traditional Christianity gradually gave way among a certain portion of the population to “Providential Deism,” whose ideas were embedded within more secular practices of consolation.Footnote ¹⁷²

This is not the place to explore the secularization of Age-of-Reform consolation in detail. I will simply observe that the Christian consolation tradition always carried within it the seeds of its own secularization, for it always retained within it numerous pagan remedies alongside and integrated with Christian ones. As Christian explanations of misfortune gradually became less plausible for a portion of the population, the Christian and the pagan elements of the Christian consolatory tradition slowly began to unravel. One sees this unraveling in the influential neo-Stoic work of Justus Lipsius, On Constancy.Footnote ¹⁷³ While Lipsius insists in a prefatory letter that “it is only in conjunction with the holy scriptures that this way of [stoic] wisdom can lead to tranquility and peace,” his work of Christian Stoicism makes no mention of Christ and contains no quotations from the New Testament.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ In response to the turmoil of religious wars, Lipsius offers his contemporaries a largely Ciceronian solace.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Boethius had done the same centuries earlier, but medieval Christians had read The Consolation of Philosophy through a Christian lens, providing Christian glosses and commentaries on the text, and adjusting the text itself, in both Latin and vernacular editions, to correspond to Christian convictions.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ By way of contrast, not long after On Constancy appeared, some Christian intellectuals—most notably, Blaise Pascal—wondered aloud whether the reconciliation between Christianity and Stoicism that Lipsius and others attempted was salutary, in part because they feared that in the current climate their contemporaries would embrace a thoroughgoing Stoicism at the expense of their Christian faith.Footnote ¹⁷⁷

More striking, and more in keeping with my argument about the importance of practices, is the way Joseph Addison wrote about loss in the extraordinarily popular publication The Spectator. According to Habermas, this publication played an important role in the growing bourgeois self-consciousness of those who read and discussed it, especially in English coffee houses.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ C. S. Lewis argued persuasively that Addison was an advocate of eighteenth-century “Rational Piety,”Footnote ¹⁷⁹ and when he sought to console his readers, he, like Lipsius, turned primarily to pagan philosophers, in Addison's case, Plutarch and Seneca. In an entry from 1711, he readily acknowledges how essential “the Arts of Consolation” are for seeking contentment in this life in the midst of affliction, and while he concedes that Christian devotion can be helpful, the remedies he suggests are purely pagan—he sees the two as separate. Addison writes to a young woman named Leonora whose fiancé had recently died of an unnamed and sudden disease. Addison interprets her loss as an example of the “little strokes of Fortune” that invariably befall one in this life. Referring to her in the third person, he advises:

Addison continues:

The practice of reading, discussing, and experiencing this kind of consolation, which was pretty brutal in its own way, helped to shape human self-understanding in the early eighteenth century along “enlightened” lines, a process that would continue in the coming decades and centuries.

The great irony of the history we have examined is that the deeply religious practice of verbal consolation, which had little interest in the development of a sense of self, helped to promote an understanding of the self that would have been utterly foreign to the men and women in the Age of Reform who so earnestly engaged in it. An intended consequence of the Age of the Reform had completely unintended consequences in the long run, which is a familiar story.Footnote ¹⁸¹ But none of this was necessary. There is no necessary causal relationship between the consolatory practices of the Age of Reform and the eventual emergence of Taylor's buffered self. As Thomas Nipperdy once observed, the Reformers were grandparents of modernity, not parents. I would say, great-grandparents, at best, for anything could have happened.Footnote ¹⁸² The Age of Reform created new possibilities for human existence that, under certain contingent circumstances, could evolve in what we would call a modernizing direction.Footnote ¹⁸³ I have explored one of these new possibilities. I have proposed an alternative way of relating the Age of Reform to modernity, or at least to one aspect of modernity, namely, the kind of self-understanding that it has encouraged among many.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ But the Age of Reform also stands as a critique and challenge to modernity, for it confronts us with a way of being human that is at once familiar and foreign, and it thus shows us what we were and what we have lost, for good and for ill. It also causes us to wonder about what we might have become.Footnote ¹⁸⁵