The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580

The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580.  By Eamon Duffy.  Yale University Press; 2^nd edition, 2005.

 

Eamon Duffy is a well-respected historian whose primary field of focus is British history from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries.  His major contribution to historiography is his revision of the prevailing view that English Catholicism was a decaying force that maintained precious little support in the broader English community when King Henry VIII broke with Rome and started the Protestant Church of England.  Duffy argues that this popular perception is quite far from the truth, and in fact Catholicism and its attendant traditions and practices were quite popular in England and formed an integral part of everyday life.

 

Revisionist history is inherently controversial, and Duffy’s work has received a wide range of responses, ranging from staunch supporters of the prevailing historiography who viewed Duffy’s perspectives as little more than wishful thinking.  In contrast, others, particularly Catholics, have responded warmly to Duffy’s scholarship, viewing it as a means of reclaiming a past that has long been distorted by false perceptions and slanted views.

 

In his introduction, Duffy criticizes the oft-stated assumption that English Catholicism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was primarily the obsession of the Church and the upper classes, and that the common people had little interest in this religion.  In this view, when Henry VIII imposed a new religious regime, the populace switched faiths without any compunction, and possibly even without much interest.  Duffy asserts that the complete opposite was the case.

 

“It is my conviction, and a central plank of the argument of the first part of this book, that no substantial gulf existed between the religion of the clergy and the educated elite on the one hand and that of the people at large on the other.  I do not believe that it is helpful or accurate to talk of the religion of the average fifteenth-century parishioner as magical, superstitious, or semi-pagan.  Nor does it seem to me that the most interesting aspect of late medieval religion lay in the views and activities of those who, like the relatively small number of Lollards, rejected its central tenets and preoccupations…It is true that the wealthy and literate had increasing access to and interest in types of spirituality previously confined to the monastery.  Yet within the diversity of medieval religious options there was a remarkable degree of religious and imaginative homogeneity across the social spectrum, a shared repertoire of symbols, prayers, and beliefs which crossed and bridge even the gulf between the literate and the illiterate.”    (2-3).

 

Duffy’s book is divided into two parts.  In the first, he describes religious life in England during his time, and argues that every aspect of the average Englishman’s life was permeated with religious teaching and practice.  Duffy studies the Mass, educational primers, belief in Purgatory, the lives of the Saints, religious business influences, and how the average person dealt with superstition and other folk beliefs that were opposed by the Catholic Church.  Duffy stresses that Catholicism was not some easily detachable and discarded trait, but instead was an essential part of the nation’s worldview.  Duffy illustrates just how deeply Catholic practices influenced people’s lives, such as in his study of the liturgy, where he describes how attending religious services helped people cope with all aspects of existence.    

 

“Any study of late medieval religion must begin with the liturgy, for within that great seasonal cycle of fast and festival, of ritual observance and symbolic gesture, lay Christians found the paradigms and the stories which shaped their perception of the world and their place in it.  Within the liturgy birth, copulation, and death, journeying and homecoming, guilt and forgiveness, the blessing of homely things and the call to pass beyond them were all located, tested, and sanctioned.  In the liturgy and in the sacramental celebrations which were its central moments, medieval people found the key to the meaning and purpose of their lives.”  (11).

 

The second half of the book is devoted to explaining how Henry VIII, his descendants, and his government changed England’s religion from Catholicism to Anglicanism.  Though Henry VIII initially saw his Church of England as exactly the same as the Roman Catholic Church, only without the Pope, others adopted new theological viewpoints.  The title of this book refers to the fact that the artwork and valuable treasures of the churches and chapels were all taken from their original homes and taken to enrich the nobility.  Indeed, the common people of England were largely impoverished as the Church’s property was taken away and its charitable activities were destroyed, and the rich nobles who promoted Protestantism seized hold of the wealth and kept it for themselves.     

 

Duffy illustrates that the average Englishman suffered in the midst of these upheavals.   The people of England obeyed their monarch because to go against their ruler, and therefore their country, was thought to be unthinkable.  Yet the actions of a determined elite minority transformed the nation from the top down, and the people had no choice but to follow them, even if it meant the death of their culture and in many ways, the destruction of a part of themselves.

 

“But the price for such accommodation, of course, was the death of the past it sought to conserve.  If Protestantism was transformed, so was traditional religion.  The imaginative world of the Golden Legion and the Festial was gradually obliterated from wall and window and bracket, from primer and block-print and sermon, and was replaced by that of the Old Testament.  Cranmer’s somberly magnificent prose, read week by week, entered and possessed their minds, and became the fabric of their prayer, the utterance of their most solemnand their most vulnerable moments.  And more astringent and strident words entered their hearts and minds too, the polemic of the Homilies, of Jewel’s Apology, of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, and of a thousand “no-popery” sermons, a relentless torrent carrying away the landmarks of a thousand years.  By the end of the 1570’s, whatever the instincts and nostalgia of their seniors, a generation was growing up which had the known nothing else, which believed the Pope to be Antichrist, the Mass a mummery, which did not look back to the Catholic past as their own, but another country, another world.”  (593).

 

The story of England at this time is a tale of how a nation’s people lost their faith by force and had another foisted upon them.  A government managed to completely change the entire country’s culture by replacing the most essential aspect of that culture: its religion.  Other historians have approached this subject with a great deal more anger and resentment, but there is no rage in Duffy’s book, only a very deep and profound sadness.  In well over six hundred pages of text, Duffy creates a picture of a beautiful and complex world, one that was unceremoniously destroyed.  It is therefore understandable why many Anglicans might find this book offensive: Duffy’s book presents the story of the imposition of Protestantism in England as a heartbreaking tragedy.

 

 

­–Chris Chan

The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision

 The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision.  By Henry Kamen, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997.

 

Mention the Spanish Inquisition, and images of terror, tyranny, torture, and religious fanaticism are bound to pop into people’s heads.  Three of the most prominent images of the Spanish Inquisition in popular culture are Edgar Allan Poe’s tale of suspense “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Mel Brooks’ musical send-up in History of the World, Part One, and the Monty Python sketch with the famous line, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”

 

The Spanish Inquisition is commonly used as a cudgel against the Catholic Church.  A reference to the Inquisition is usually used by the Church’s detractors to strip the Church of its moral authority, painting it as bigoted, violent, and cruel.  Even staunch Catholics feel that the Inquisition is a blot on the Church’s history.  Certainly the Inquisition was no credit to those who led it, and there were many cases of innocent people suffering for actions of conscience, but for all of its disturbing sins and injustices, the Spanish Inquisition is one of the most misunderstood and wrongly represented periods in history.  This is not meant to say that the prevailing views of the Inquisition are wholly wrong, far from it, but the Inquisition has been blended with mythology and historical distortions, so that the popular conception of the Inquisition is a far cry from the actual historical event.

 

Kamen first wrote The Spanish Inquisition as a young scholar in 1965, arguing that for all of the Inquisition’s iniquities, the overreaching devastation and viciousness that supposedly characterized the era was grossly exaggerated, a product of Protestant propaganda, Enlightenment exaggerations, and authors of historical novels that were more fancy than fact.  The true state of Spain during the time of the Inquisition is too complex to summarize, but the Inquisition was run by the Spanish government, at a time when the country was fighting over its national identity.  Anti-Semitism was common, but a surprising amount of fear and hostility was directed towards many Jewish converts to Christianity, even against families that had been Catholic for generations.  Yet the complexity, intricacy, and contradictions of the era make summarizing the time period challenging, and prove that the popular conceptions of the age have been highly distorted.  The scope of this review cannot do justice to all of the points that Kamen addresses, and the absence of time spent discussing certain aspects of his analysis is not meant to belittle or whitewash any facts not covered here. 

 

Kamen observes that, “We can be certain of one thing.  Spain was not, as often imagined, a society dominated exclusively by zealots.” (5)  In his introduction, Kamen writes about his goals in writing this book:

 

“Written principally for the general reader, this book pays due attention to the major scholarly themes that have dominated Inquisition studies.  Its conclusions, though based firmly on documentary sources, will not satisfy everybody.  My aim, however, has been t go beyond polemic and present a balanced and updated synthesis of what we know about the most notorious tribunal of the western world.  Like its predecessor, my book is fundamentally a ‘state of the question’ paper and therefore still open to discussion.  It is dedicated to all those who have helped us to look more dispassionately at the Holy Office of the Inquisition.” (xi-xii)

 

Kamen is a very good writer, but he deals with a massive and complex subject, and for people with a limited background in European history, particularly Spanish history, the sheer breadth of information is enough to overwhelm casual readers.  History is way more complex.  In order to understand the political culture during the reign of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, it is important to know the details behind the Reconquista.  In order to understand the Reconquista, one needs a solid grasp of the details of life under the years of Muslim conquest.  In order to comprehend the state of society under Muslim rule, one needs to know what life was like before that...  And so on and so forth.  Kamen’s greatest stumbling block as a writer is a common one for many historians.  He knows so much about Spanish history that he often forgets that many of his readers have a much more limited knowledge of the subject. One does not need to be an expert on Spanish history to appreciate this Kamen’s fine work, but it may require a little additional effort in to understand the nuances of historical currents at work here.

 

Another problem facing those who seek to easily summarize the Inquisition is the fact that the Inquisition seemed to have broad popular support.  Kamen writes:

 

“Throughout the history of the Inquisition, commentators agreed on the impressive support given to it by the people.  Foreign visitors to the peninsula were appalled by the mass participation of the public in autos de fe.  Subsequent defenders of the tribunal felt that they could in part justify the Inquisition by the evidence of its roots in the authentic faith of Spainards.  Opponents of the tribunal were equally impressed.  Eceb the great Llorente, the first modern historian of the tribunal, was staggered by the lack of evidence for any opposition to it in Spain…

The apparent support given by the people to the Inquisition has inevitably created problems of interpretation.  Partisans of the Holy Office have maintained that its popularity was based on its unswerving sense of justice, and that it responded to a profound religious need.  Critics, by contrast, have presented it as a tyranny imposed by the state upon the free conscience of Spainards.  Both extremes of opinion can probably be supported by contemporary evidence, but neither is wholly plausible.  The primitive state bureaucracies of fifteenth-century Castile and Aragon were ill equipped to impose a tyranny on the mass of the people abd in reality never attempted to do so.  If the Inquisition acquired a broad base of support, on the other hand, we need to examine why this came about.” (66)

 

Other writers have attempted to revise conceptions of the Inquisition.  Thomas F. Madden’s brief essay “The Truth About the Spanish Inquisition” (http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/history/world/wh0075.html), is an interesting overview of how contemporary scholarship has led to major revisions of scholarly interpretations of the Inquisition.  Madden’s essay, though its theses vary slightly from Kamen’s work, may be a useful piece of pre-reading before studying Kamen’s book.

 

 

“The Inquisition helped to institutionalize the prejudices and attitudes that had previously been commonplace in society.  Like all police forces that operate in secrecy and are not publicly accountable, it began to enjoy the arrogance of power.  As the society of conflict developed, the Inquisition found itself at the centre of communal tensions.  The people accepted it because its punishments were directed not against them but against the scapegoats and the marginalized: heretics, foreigners, deviants.  Outside the crisis years of the mid-sixteenth century, few intellectuals felt threatened.  From the early eighteenth century onwards many felt that the Inquisition could be rendered harmless if subjected entirely to government control.  Not until the end of that century did the tribunal show itself to be clearly out of step with opinion in both Church and state.”   (320)

 

What lessons should we draw from our revised view of the Spanish Inquisition?  The Inquisition is often denounced as an example of intolerance gone mad.  Yet one particularly harmful form of intolerance is the belief that the people of the past were less intelligent, decent, and civilized that the people of the modern era.  If we bemoan the very real flaws of past societies, we have to be seriously prepared to address the similar problems in our own culture.  Observers of American culture can see how people who diverge from the standards of political correctness are demonized in the public arena.  Right now in Great Britain, victims of violent crimes are sued and prosecuted simply for defending themselves against assaults, and children are charged with crimes (known as Anti-Social Behaviour Ordinances) for as little as playing ball in the streets.  (For a look at the insanity that has crept into the British legal system, please read John Mortimer’s perceptive novel Rumpole Misbehaves).  The Spanish Inquisition was not a time for anyone involved to be proud of it, but those who condemn the mores of the past would to well to turn a critical eye towards the follies of the present.

 

 

–Chris Chan

Saint Francis of Assisi

Saint Francis of Assisi.  By G.K. Chesterton, numerous editions, first published 1923.

 

Saint Francis of Assisi is simultaneously one of the most famous and most misrepresented saints.  Painted as a kind of proto-hippie, a crusader against an overly worldly and materialistic Church hierarchy, and as an over-idealistic aesthetic by various sources, G.K. Chesterton asserts that all of these misconceptions are very far from the true life and legacy of Saint Francis of Assisi.

 

Chesterton is fully aware that the major problem facing him is that the average reader is improperly educated about history and culture.  The great curse of common knowledge is the belief that “everybody knows” something.  “Everybody knows” that the Dark Ages was a time of stagnation in Europe, and “everybody knows” that certain people were horrid human beings, and “everybody knows” so many other things, so there is no need to question them or give them a second thought.

 

The problem is, all too often, everybody is wrong.  All too often a narrative or a character summation has been passed around from generation to generation in a kind of gigantic game of “telephone,” where the story is repeated with ever-so-slight adjustments each time, until the current version of the tale is almost completely unrecognizable from its initial form.  Common knowledge is dangerous because it is so prone to turning everybody into ignoramuses.  When everybody assumes that the world was a certain way and that famous portraits of people’s character must be accurate, it never occurs to them to question if someone’s name has not been whitewashed or if an era’s reputation has not been unjustly dragged through the mud.  

 

Chesterton’s book is not based on long-lost documentary evidence on the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, or even extensive research on the existing literature on the man.  Instead, Chesterton challenges the reader to review everything he thinks he knows about the man and his era.  Guiding the reader through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and providing the reader with psychological insight into the people who figured prominently in St. Francis of Assisi’s life, Chesterton asks the reader to move beyond facile snap judgments of who the heroes and villains (if any) of the story are and to really think about who people are, what their actions meant to their own lives, to the lives of those around them, and to the world in general.

 

Chesterton takes pains to stress that St. Francis was a man of God, not the New Age flower child that he is occasionally depicted as being in popular culture.  As the following passage shows, St. Francis loved nature and animals because they were the creations of God, not because they had a supernatural power of their own.

 

“St. Francis was not a lover of nature. Properly understood, a lover of nature was precisely what he was not. The phrase implies accepting the material universe as a vague environment, a sort of sentimental pantheism. In the romantic period of literature, in the age of Byron and Scott, it was easy enough to imagine that a hermit in the ruins of a chapel (preferably by moonlight) might find peace and a mild pleasure in the harmony of

solemn forests and silent stars, while he pondered over some scroll or illuminated volume, about the liturgical nature of which the author was a little vague. In short, the hermit might love nature as a background. Now for St. Francis nothing was ever in the background. We might say that his mind had no background, except perhaps that divine darkness out of which the divine love had called up every coloured creature one by one.

He saw everything as dramatic, distinct from its setting, not all of a piece like a picture but in action like a play. A bird went by him like an arrow; something with a story and a purpose, though it was a purpose of life and not a purpose of death. A bush could stop him like a brigand; and indeed he was as ready to welcome the brigand as the bush.

In a word, we talk about a man who cannot see the wood for the trees. St. Francis was a man who did not want to see the wood for the trees. He wanted to see each tree as a separate and almost a sacred thing, being a child of God and therefore a brother or sister of man.”

 

All too often, St. Francis’s life and teachings are used to castigate the Church for being too worldly.  These critics fail to realize that the Church could not perform the charitable work is does without funds.  St. Francis’s order was founded as a group of monks in need of lifelong charity themselves.  Chesterton argues that the Pope realized that there was plenty of room in the Church for Franciscans, but that it was not necessary, indeed potentially detrimental, for all members of the clergy to be Franciscans.  Chesterton writes:

 

“The truth is that this incident shows two things which are common enough in Catholic history, but very little understood by the journalistic history of industrial civilization. It shows that the Saints were sometimes great men when the Popes were small men. But it also shows that great men are sometimes wrong when small men are right. And it will be found, after all, very difficult for any candid and clear-headed outsider to deny that the Pope was right, when he insisted that the world was not made only for Franciscans.”

 

Chesterton’s book is relatively short, but each page is full of insight and wisdom.  It is an easy read, consisting of concise summaries of the major events of Saint Francis’s life, as well as profiles of the other major figures of his life and descriptions of the state of the world.  At the end of his book, Chesterton writes:

 

“For that is the full and final spirit in which we should turn to St. Francis; in the spirit of thanks for what he has done. He was above all things a great giver; and he cared chiefly for the best kind of giving which is called thanksgiving. If another great man wrote a grammar of assent, he may well be said to have written a grammar of acceptance; a grammar of gratitude. He understood down to its very depths the theory of thanks; and its

depths are a bottomless abyss. He knew that the praise of God stands on its strongest ground when it stands on nothing. He knew that we can best measure the towering miracle of the mere fact of existence if we realize that but for some strange mercy we should not even exist. And something of that larger truth is repeated in a lesser form in our own relations with so mighty a maker of history. He also is a giver of things we could not have even thought of for ourselves; he also is too great for anything but gratitude. From him came a whole awakening of the world and a dawn in which all shapes and colours could be seen anew.”

 

Readers will be lucky to take away from this book a renewed sense of appreciation of the world and a strengthened feeling of gratitude for the grace of God.  The point of reading lives of the saints is to inspire and to encourage people to live better, more virtuous lives that prove beneficial to others and the world.  In his book on the life of Saint Francis, Chesterton does not necessarily encourage his readers to mirror the great saint’s behavior exactly, but he does suggest that his readers would greatly benefit to strive to approximate Saint Francis’s great reverence for God and pure appreciation for all of God’s creation.  Saint Francis of Assisi was Chesterton’s first major theological work written after he entered the Catholic Church, so it is infused with the energy of a convert who has recently found his way home and is now seeing the world with fresh eyes.

 

 

–Chris Chan