This article appeared in Vol. IV, Issue 1 of Ad Fontes in September 2019.

I. INTRODUCTION: THE DISTURBER OF THE PEACE

In 1326, an Italian physician and diplomat named Marsilius of Padua hastily packed his bags and stole away to the south German city of Nuremberg. Things were getting too hot for him in Paris, and he needed to seek protection with the Holy Roman Emperor, Ludwig of Bavaria. Before long, a papal bull arrived in Paris from the court of Pope John XXII excommunicating him for heresy. Indeed, a few years later, another Pope was to write, “We are bold to say that we have almost never read a worse heretic than that Marsilius. For we have extracted from the mandate of Benedict our predecessor on a certain book of his more than 240 heretical articles.”^[1]

The book in question was the Defensor Pacis, or Defender of the Peace, perhaps the most remarkable work of political theory to appear in the entire Middle Ages. Dedicated to the theme of peace, and to investigating the causes of tranquility and intranquility in politics, the work takes a suddenly controversial turn at the end of its first main section, “Discourse I.” In Italy, and all of Europe, Marsilius declares, the popes have claimed a “plenitude of power”—supreme dominion over all matters spiritual and temporal—and this is “the singular cause…of intranquility or discord in a city or realm…And since this pernicious plague, which is so profoundly inimical to all human calm and happiness, could…infect all other realms of Christian faithful in this world, I judge it of the first necessity to repel it.”^[2]

The Defender of the Peace was written first and foremost as a defense of what we would now call the rights of sovereignty, the rights of each political realm to decide how to govern itself and how to form its communal life without external interference. The spirit of the work was not unlike that of today’s global movement which many pundits call “the new nationalism.”^[3] This movement sees in the pretensions of the EU and the UN an imperialistic, un-representative bureaucracy; its executive, legislative, and judicial powers penetrate into every crevice of national and communal life, wrapped in a halo of high-minded rhetoric, while in fact undermining the freedom of communities to chart their own course and provide for their own defense. The late medieval papacy, after all, had amassed an astonishing range of powers. If the Pope did not approve of a war or the succession claims of a ruler, he could excommunicate rulers or place entire nations under interdict—refusing the sacraments (and thereby salvation) to an entire populace until the king got in line or the people revolted.

Although these most sweeping powers were rarely invoked (and even more rarely successful), the immense body of the clergy and the monastic orders still constituted a vast “state within a state” in each of the realms of Europe. They were ultimately answerable to the Pope rather than to their temporal lords, yet free from taxation, exempt from military service, and not even subject to civil prosecution when accused of crimes; claiming “the benefit of the clergy,” they could have their cases tried and often readily dismissed by ecclesiastical courts, however gross their crimes.

All of this would have been bad enough if the Church were merely an internationalist bureaucracy like the UN or EU, but what added insult to injury for the lords of Europe was that the Papacy wanted to have its cake and eat it too. While claiming to stand impartially above the ugly fray of earthly politics, popes simultaneously insisted that they had their own patrimony to protect: the much-coveted Papal States of central Italy, a power base sufficient to allow them to jostle for position in the politics of Renaissance Europe. Many popes shamelessly abused their spiritual authority over other European rulers to serve their political aims in the Italian peninsula, excommunicating their adversaries and calling for crusades against them.

Such crusades were to be funded, of course, by indulgences—a brilliant mechanism for collecting income from the citizens of even hostile nations. It was such an indulgence campaign, proclaimed by one claimant to the papal throne to finance a war against his rival, that prompted John Huss, the proto-reformer of Prague, to say “enough is enough.” He paid for his courage at the stake. Others, though, with more powerful protectors, loudly lampooned the absurd corruption of this arrangement. On the eve of the Reformation itself, Erasmus of Rotterdam would write the satirical play Julius Excluded from Heaven, a side-splitting account of the Renaissance warrior-pope, Julius II, being refused entry to the gates of Heaven by St. Peter and promising to raise an army from his followers in Hell to storm Heaven by force.^[4]

II. THE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE REFORMATION

When the storm of pent-up protest finally burst in the 1500s in the Protestant Reformation, Europe experienced a reformation (or revolution) every bit as political as it was religious. Much as we might like to praise “the simple power of the Gospel,” and eulogize the martyrs who became in death more than conquerors for the Protestant faith, the simple fact of the matter is that the Reformation succeeded in large part because it won the support of princes and parliaments. Where the Reformation failed—most prominently in France and Spain—it lacked such support. And this was hardly random; in the years just prior to the Reformation, the rulers of both France and Spain had succeeded in wresting significant national independence from the Papacy, independence which rulers in Germany and England were seeking. The post-Reformation Catholic Church would be a much-chastened church, deprived in practice of many of the key powers and prerogatives it had claimed in the late medieval period.

In recent decades, it has become standard to recount all this with a certain chagrin and shame-facedness, and to remember the Reformation as the time when the church became subservient to the state, when short-sighted Protestant Reformers made a devil’s bargain with power-hungry princes and lost the liberty of the Gospel—a liberty which only later pietist and Puritan heroes would recover. But this is the story I want to challenge. I want to argue that the causes of national independence and church reform were not uneasy bedfellows, but intimately linked.

The story—and the two contradictory interpretations of it—are encapsulated in the famous phrase cuius regio, eius religio. This phrase summed up the epochal settlement of the 1555 Peace of Augsburg, which ended the Papacy’s dream of an undivided church under the see of St. Peter and Emperor Charles V’s dream of a universal Catholic Empire. The Peace of Augsburg declared that “whose the kingdom was, his was the religion”; that is to say, each principality in the Holy Roman Empire could choose whether to enforce Roman Catholicism, Lutheran Protestantism, or even to tolerate some measure of each. It became the blueprint for the early modern vision of national churches and national religious establishments throughout Europe.

To us today, this looks less like a grant of liberty than a blueprint of bondage. After all, we think today of liberty as something that belongs to individuals over against the state; by granting princes the power to determine religion within their territories, the Peace of Augsburg seems to take away such liberty. For us, freedom is a zero-sum game, and the freedom of the sovereign to determine religion is necessarily the end of freedom for his subjects.  From this standpoint, the political pretensions of Reformation-era princes seem to be in profound tension with the evangelical goals of the movement.

For us, freedom is a zero-sum game, and the freedom of the sovereign to determine religion is necessarily the end of freedom for his subjects.

But that is not how it looked in the early modern period. The alternative, after all, was not freedom of individual conscience, but rather subordination to the papacy. Either the papal church could determine all questions of orthodoxy and demand the universal submission of every Christian conscience, or else different princes could be left free to follow their own consciences in legislating for their principalities. Now, if you were not a prince, your options were still limited, but they were still a bit freer than before; if you were a convinced Catholic in a Lutheran territory, or vice versa, you could always move next door. And indeed, because these patchwork principalities were quite small, some did. This was not much, but it was something. And this something would, in due course, take root and grow into the durable structures of modern freedom.

III. FREDERICK THE WISE’S TRADE PROBLEMS

Few people realize that what really kicked off the Reformation was a concern as modern and mundane as trade deficits. I have already mentioned the sometimes-perverse uses to which the Papacy could put indulgences, get-out-of-purgatory-free cards that were anything but free for the impoverished common people to purchase. Few areas had been the site of such frequent indulgence preaching campaigns as northern Germany, and by the eve of the Reformation, the area was something of a “burnt- over district.” Enter Johann Tetzel, traveling salesman extraordinaire.

Ostensibly ordered to help finance the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, much of the money from Tetzel’s 1517 indulgence campaign actually went into the coffers of Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz. Albrecht needed it to repay the Fugger banking family for immense debts he had contracted to buy from the Pope the most powerful church office in Germany at the age of 23. Since the most enthusiastic buyers of indulgences were the uneducated and gullible poor, Tetzel’s indulgence campaign constituted an extraordinary redistribution of wealth upward from the poorest to the richest—a social justice theme that, though largely forgotten, echoed loudly through the pages of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses and other sermons from the period.^[5]

However, it also constituted an extraordinary redistribution of wealth out of certain German principalities, where Tetzel did most of his preaching, into the principalities of archbishop Albrecht—and indeed on a larger scale out of the Holy Roman Empire into the Papal States. In modern terms, indulgences were the vehicle for perpetuating a large ongoing trade imbalance between Germany and Italy. Tired of having his impoverished subjects pay their last farthing for dubious spiritual benefits that materially benefited his rivals, Frederick the Wise banned Tetzel from preaching in his territory.^[5]

Tetzel did what every good gambling tycoon has learned: set up shop right on the borders of the banned territory. So effective was his propaganda that commoners from around Saxony flocked to the border to buy remittance for the penalties of their sins and those of their relatives. Luther, disgusted by the perverse lengths to which Tetzel was willing to go—well beyond what medieval theology sanctioned—took up his pen, and the rest is history, right?

Well, hardly. Luther himself would’ve been history in short order if it weren’t for the intervention of Elector Frederick. Although himself a devout devotee of traditionalist Catholic religion, Frederick was not about to let some corrupt Pope across the Alps—or even the upstart Hapsburg Emperor in Austria, who was trying to consolidate his control over Germany as part of his universal Christian Empire that stretched from Peru to India—tell him what to do with his prize Wittenberg professor. If the dispute began as a question of trade deficits, it was prolonged by something as modern and mundane as school pride: Frederick had founded the University of Wittenberg, and now that it was just attain- ing notoriety, he wasn’t about to hand over its celebrity teacher without a fair trial. Of course, this was not mere sentiment, but also good state policy; Frederick had established the University to advance the education of Saxony and improve its standing amongst the principalities of Europe, and he was determined to set a precedent of defending the independence and prerogatives of Saxony.

We are apt now to look back at these considerations and say, “Ah, so you’re saying he defended the Reformation merely out of political motives, not religious ones. Looks like the cynics are right.” But why should this be cynicism? Frederick was called “the Wise” for a reason, and although he went at least to his deathbed, and perhaps to his grave, unconvinced of the evangelical faith, his motives for defending the nascent Reformation were genuinely laudable ones. Indulgences impoverished his people, weakened his principality, and strengthened his untrustworthy rivals to the south. The crackdown on Luther from 1518 onward represented a threat to the educational system of Saxony, an attack on academic freedom, an undermining of regional sovereignty, and a disregard for the legal jurisdiction of Saxony. “Luther might be a heretic, but he’s my heretic” was more or less Frederick’s posture during these crucial seven years. Although no apostle of religious liberty in a full-blown modern sense, he did think that genuine conscientious convictions, backed up by good arguments, demanded a fair hearing, and he was not about to let the great question be settled by some behind-closed-doors inquisition in Italy.

IV. HENRY VIII’S MARRIAGE PROBLEMS

If Frederick was no apostle of religious liberty, that is truer still of Henry VIII, a bold, bombastic, sometimes boorish figure who was hardly someone you’d want for a son-in-law, but who nonetheless scarcely deserves the scorn that is regularly visited on him today. To properly understand the English Reformation—which was after all the crucible in which our modern Anglo-American laws and liberties were forged—we must understand that here too, politics and religion were deeply intertwined, and that does not mean the politics or the religion were all bad.

We often hear that the only reason we had an English Reformation was because Henry VIII couldn’t keep his zipper up, and everyone is familiar with Henry’s infamous six wives—“off with their heads!” But Henry’s big political problem wasn’t lust; a lusty king, after all, was generally allowed to carry on a discreet affair or two on the side. No, Henry’s problem was that his wife Catherine kept miscarrying, and the only living child she had managed to produce was a girl, Mary. In 1520s England, this constituted something approaching a political crisis. Without a male heir to succeed him on the throne, Henry expected England to be engulfed again by the sort of civil war that had devastated the nation just a few decades earlier, and perhaps to fall prey to the ambitious designs of France and Spain.

To Henry, Catherine’s miscarriages suggested divine judgment on his house and his nation. Catherine had originally been his short-lived older brother’s wife, and church law, following Leviticus 20:21, stipulated that no one must marry his brother’s wife. Although the Pope had been happy to grant a special dispensation for Catherine to remarry Henry, Henry became convinced that the Pope had erred, and that God was cursing him and his kingdom for his illicit marriage—after all, Leviticus 20:21 threatened that violators would be childless. If the new Pope could be convinced to reverse his predecessor’s ruling, the marriage to Catherine would be annulled and Henry could try again for an heir with the beautiful young Anne Boleyn. Such annulments were common enough, but there was one small technicality: Catherine’s nephew was the aforementioned universal Christian emperor, Charles V, whose armies had just sacked Rome after a quarrel with the Pope. Pope Clement VII reasoned, sensibly enough, that he’d be better off keeping Charles happy than the boisterous king of a little island on the edge of the map.

All through the late 1520s and early 1530s the negotiations for Henry’s divorce continued, and into them crept a new element, or rather an old element newly coming to the fore. The kinds of grievances that Marsilius had voiced two centuries before—the clergy’s corruption and scandalous immunity from criminal prosecution, the vast properties they held independent from royal authority in allegiance to a foreign ruler, the Pope, the Pope’s tendency to throw his weight around for political ends—had resonated deeply with English civil lawyers over the previous decades. The vast and tangled patchwork of medieval canon law was seen as a net of papal and clerical tyranny that interfered with English laws and liberties. Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s chief advisor, had Marsilius translated into English for the first time in the 1530s. The Church, Marsilius had argued, consisted not of the clergy, but of the whole body of believers. And thus, the earthly, temporal organization of the church depended not on a Pope in Rome, but on the organization of each body politic or nation.^[6]

England, on this theory, was its own Christian nation, free to chart its own course. This idea, championed by Cromwell and the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer (both closet Protestants), offered a more radical solution to Henry’s problem. If the Church of Rome would not authorize Henry’s divorce, perhaps the Church of England could do so on her own. The necessary constitutional changes—argued, as any good English lawyer would, on the basis of neglected historical precedent—were accomplished in a series of acts of Parliament from 1532 onward, the most important of which forbade paying ecclesiastical taxes from England to the Pope (again, the concern with trade deficits!) and appealing judicial proceedings to ecclesiastical courts outside England. The capstone was the 1534 Act of Supremacy, which declared that the “king…shall be taken, accepted, and reputed the only supreme head of the Church of England.”^[7]

V. ELIZABETHAN ERASTIANISM?

What are faithful Protestants today to make of a statement like this? When we look back now on the establishment of the Church of England—particularly those of us raised on Puritan and Presbyterian lore—we see “Erastianism,” the bondage of the church to the state, the use of religion for cynical political ends. But this is substantially misleading, pitting against one another two things that the Reformers saw to be tightly linked: faithfulness and security, the magistrate’s care for religion and for his people. As the great reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli argued, “It cannot be denied that the magistrate’s duty includes the defence of the cities and commonwealths that he commands, and to provide that they come to no harm. Since idolatry is the cause of captivity, pestilence, famine and subversions of commonwealths, the magistrate should repress these things and preserve the true and sound religion.”^[8]

On this understanding, then, the faithful Christian magistrate—say, Queen Elizabeth I of England—had a God-given responsibility to forbid idolatry in her realm to protect national security.  But what if repression of idolatry also undermined national security? This was the conundrum that Elizabeth I faced throughout her reign. Although she did impose Protestant worship when she came to the throne, she studiously avoided any active persecution of Roman Catholics, aiming to win their loyalty while slowly detaching them from the religion of their forefathers. The strategy worked, for when in 1569 some Catholic lords rose in the Northern Rebellion to crown Elizabeth’s Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, they found meager support and were quickly dispersed. However, in one of the great exhibitions of the importance of high-speed communications technology, Pope Pius V, belatedly receiving word of the rising in 1570, decided to bolster it by issuing the bull Regnans in Excelsis; in it, he deployed the full excommunicating and deposing powers that Marsilius had critiqued centuries earlier, “absolving” subjects of their obedience to Elizabeth and revoking her claim to the crown.^[9]

The faithful Christian magistrate—say, Queen Elizabeth I of England—had a God-given responsibility to forbid idolatry in her realm to protect national security.

By the time the bull arrived, the rebellion was over, and the result was simply a harsher crackdown on Roman Catholics, who were now seen as potential rebels and traitors (hardly an idle threat, as a string of assassinations and Catholic terrorist plots in England and France over the ensuing decades were to demonstrate). Worse still, the Pope had invited foreign Catholic powers to invade England now that it had no rightful ruler. The Spanish, who had nearly gained control of England right before Elizabeth’s accession in 1558, weighed this invitation very seriously, and finally took it up with the ill-fated attack of the Spanish Armada of 1588. Early in her reign, Elizabeth had enforced outward conformity to certain theologically trivial trappings of the old Catholic religion, such as the vestments worn by the priests, to convince foreign Catholic powers that her nation was not too Protestant after all. Unfortunately, she also succeeded in antagonizing more zealous Protestants at home, whom we now know as the “Puritans.” Although we think of them as early apostles of religious liberty, in fact, one of their greatest protests was that Elizabeth did not more fully purge idolatry from the land, wiping out all traces of Catholic faith and practice. Convinced for three decades that she was inviting divine wrath by this failure, their movement was only blunted when the miraculous defeat of the Spanish Armada demonstrated that God must not have been so angry with England after all.

VI. PURITAN INTERNATIONALISM AND HOOKERIAN NATIONALISM

But there was one other element of the Puritan protest, and the established church’s response, that is apt to turn our categories on their heads. Defenders of the established church are ordinarily labelled “conformists” by historians today, so we may be surprised to find the most famous conformist of all, Richard Hooker, accusing his Puritan adversary, Thomas Cartwright, of being the great conformitarian:

Our opponents harshly charge the church of England with forgetting her duty to model herself on the pattern of those churches that went before her in the work of reformation. For, they say, “just as the churches of Christ should be as dissimilar as possible from the synagogue of Antichrist in their use of indifferent ceremonies, so they ought to be as similar to one another as possible”, and for the preservation of unity, to have as much as possible all of the same ceremonies. Again, …they say, “As children of one father and servants of one family, so all churches should not only have the same diet (the Word of God) but also the same uniform (by using the same ceremonies). ^[10]

The Puritans, like the papists, were staunch internationalists, committed to the idea of a transnational Christian church united in doctrine, practice, and church government. If the Reformation was to take a certain form in Geneva or the Netherlands, well then surely it ought to take the same form in England. It is not a stretch to see Hooker’s whole elaborate defense of the Church of England as a defense of national sovereignty, of the freedom of each particular Christian community to determine the form of its own corporate life, rather than conforming to one unyielding standard. Against Cartwright, he argues:

They have not yet proved that just because foreign churches have done well, it is our duty to follow them, or that we must forsake our own course (otherwise well suited to us) just because it differs from that of other churches… [T]hese churches
surely cannot think that they have discovered absolutely the best ceremonies that the wit of man could ever devise; rather,
if they recognize that they are naturally partial to their own ceremonies simply because they are their own, it is only fair for
them to recognize that we too will be partial to our own. Thus we are released from the burden of being forced either to condemn them or imitate them…This we can do without in any way criticizing our reformed brethren abroad; on the contrary,
we approve their practices as well as our own.^[11]

In other words, just because one church has a good way of doing things, other churches need not follow suit. The good takes multiple forms, adapted to different cultures, times, places, and necessities. Weekly eucharist might be best for one, and monthly for another; presbyters might be good for a city-state, bishops for a kingdom. And of course, human beings being what they are, each nation will tend to proudly incline toward its own practices as best. That’s perfectly fine, Hooker indulgently remarks, just so long as we realize that this is what we’re doing, and don’t blame others for doing the same in defense of their own national practices. Hooker then appears as something of a defender of a certain level of religious pluralism, and indeed religious liberty—only it is not the liberty of the individual, but the liberty of the Christian community.^[12]

VII. SOVEREIGNTY, COMMUNITY, AND DESPOTISM

This is all well and good, but a problem remained. The “Christian community” whose freedom Hooker defends throughout his famous Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is something of an imaginary one. How could a nation of 4 million, divided by geography, dialects, and local customs to a degree that is difficult for us to imagine today, function meaningfully as a “community”? When the nation was torn by religious tensions, was it really plausible for Hooker to represent it as a unity, with a national personality, a national culture, and national traditions that it ought to assert against the insistent Puritan and papist demands for international conformity? Hooker made perhaps some real progress toward meeting this objection by his very strong concept of political representation: “A law is the deed of the whole body politic, and if you consider yourselves any part of it, then the law is even your deed also.”^[14] Furthermore, “we do consent to be commanded whenever the society we belong to has previously consented and has not revoked this consent by some universal agreement. Just as any man’s past deed belongs to him as long as he lives, so also the act of a public society of men done five hundred years ago continues to belong to it, since societies are immortal. We lived in those who went before us, and they continue to live in those who follow them.”^[13]

Themes such as this were to inspire the great Edmund Burke and generations of Anglo-American conservatives. And yet even if this vision was a myth in the best sense of the word, a myth it remained, and one that could readily underwrite tyranny rather than liberty. The fact was that for all the manifold evils of the late medieval church, it did have the great benefit of helping to maintain what we might call a “complex political space”—societies characterized by multiple overlapping institutions and sets of loyalties, which tended to prevent the easy monopolization of power by any one institution or authority. Indeed, the biggest objection against the Papacy’s political claims was less that they succeeded in propping up papal tyranny—which anyone with a decent army could often ignore—but that they created political chaos, a maze of conflicting loyalties and rival jurisdictions that undermined the practice of justice and sapped the strength of civic communities. The Reformers and their princely allies were eager to simplify this maze, rationalize the law codes, and unify political communities around a common good. But the great danger of this unification was a hollowing-out of society under the single sovereign with a monopoly not merely on the legitimate use of violence, but on the people’s loves and loyalties. Political theorists like Thomas Hobbes were to promote such a vision in 17th-century England, and this vision was to become a frightening reality in Louis XIV’s France. Today, Catholic political theorists and theologians like William Cavanaugh and Patrick Deneen look back upon these Reformation-era changes as the basis of the idolatrous bureaucratic modern nation-state and the source of civil society’s shattering into a collection of isolated individuals under a distant authority.^[16]

For all their insight, Reformers like Vermigli and Hooker will not provide us sufficient resources to counter such claims. Instead, we must look to Luther himself, with his crucial but neglected theology of the “three estates”—family, church, and state—and even more to the great early Protestant political theorist Johannes Althusius, who took up his pen at the same time as Hooker to propose a bottom-up theory of the state as a “community of communities” that would reject papal pretensions, head off the ambitions of absolute rulers and despotic national states, and lay a groundwork for durable individual liberty. No effort toward a “Protestant Christendom” will get airborne without the guiding lights of Hookerian nationalism and Althusian federalism. I hope you will join us as we sketch such a vision in the issues that follow.