The Protestants BOOKS
J. H. PLUMB
We rarely realise how completely steeped we are in western culture : born in it, bred in it, edu- cated in it, we accept it and believe in it, and seldom give it the long cool look that so many of its oddities deserve. And religion, the Christian religion, is one. Yes, an oddity. If we glance for a moment at the other great religions of the world—Buddhism, Confucianism, Hindu- ism, the Taoists, the followers of Zen, the poly- theisms of Greece, of Rome, of Sumer, of Egypt, we find tolerance, a continuing tolerance of other Gods and of divergent beliefs; Buddhism grows as many branches as the banyan tree, but no one is called a heretic. Heresy, and all its mur- derous consequences, are to be found only in Christianity, or in its first cousin, Islam.
And heresy appears quite late, even in Christianity. The first three centuries passed without the deliberate massacre of other Christians who differed only on a point of dogma. The Donatists in the fourth century wore, in a sense, the beginning of the long cruel story of heresy, of the slaughter of men, women and children, often done with deliber- ate and extravagant horror, that has stained the history of Christianity with gallons of blood. Its history reeks of burning, tortured flesh. And yet this is the religion of brotherly love.
That the infidel might be fair game for slaugh- ter has been an occasional aberration with other religions, but with its ancestor Judaism apia its close relation Islam, it has been the compulsive neurosis of Christianity for cen- turies. It is as well to remind ourselves that European civilisation has been one of the bloodiest and most aggressive in man's history. It has been the epicentre of all the major global wars. Indeed, war as a totally destructive force was born on the battlefields of Europe. How far the European's aggression was fed by his ideo- logical ferocity is a difficult yet necessary ques- tion. Whatever the answer may be, this unholy combination of cruelty and religion is an inescapable fact.
It is brought home vividly by The Progress of the Protestant: A Pictorial History of Early Reformers to Present Day Ecumenism (Holt, Rinehart, Winston, New York/London $14.95/ 140s), by John Haverstick : a book which should be by anyone's bedside who believes his own view of life to be so absolutely true that it should be imposed on others with napalm, ma and firing squads. John Haverstick has brought together a splendidly varied collection of illustrations, many of them little-known wood- cuts from the martyrologies of Catholic and Protestant. They are carefully organised under subjects and strung together in a long chain; the effect is cumulative, exciting and highly educative.
The late mediaeval origins of Protestantism, based largely on anti-clericalism, are followed by the tremendous and savage conflicts of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Here the woodcuts drip with holy gore. We see the starved Catholics of Amboise, stripped naked, drawn forcibly over a taut rope and then slowly roasted. Not that the Catholics treated their yictinHs more sweetly : the Inquisition was no more sparing of the rack than Elizabeth I's Pro- testant torturers, and the smell of burning Pro- testant flesh floated from time to time across the quiet market square of Cambridge in the days of her father and sister. All done, of course, from the highest of motives—the service of truth. Even though the fires died out and the racks grew rusty, life did not get much jollier. Gaol, whopping fines, second-class citizenship, inter- spersed with occasional outbursts of sadistic violence, remained the lot of the unorthodox in either Protestant or Catholic countries. And yet, as Protestant sects multiplied and proved indes- tructible, toleration grew and Europeans prided themselves on the discovery of what the East had practised for millennia.
However, the restless old Adam of dogmatic truth needed fresh fields now the old battle- grounds at home were no longer so readily avail- able. Protestant and Catholic missionaries fought their battles anew over the souls of the primitive peoples of Africa or America or the misguided ones of India and China. It is odd to realise that the last, bitter war between Protest- ant and Catholic was fought out by the black adherents of these faiths in Uganda in the nineteenth century. The pictures and the wood- cuts become, however, a little milder—baptisms of chiefs, or the impressive piety of the black brands plucked from burning, with only here and there a picture of a Baptist missionary being clubbed to death. Naturally Mr Haverstick does not neglect the internal history of Protestantism —its manic obsession with the devil and all his works, its crude manifestations in the camp meeting or the wilder heresies that flourished in the semi-literate frontier society. To whatever aspect of the subject he turns his sharp and piercing eye, he always has something pertinent to say and a batch of illustrations to illuminate his story. My one complaint about this beauti- ful, impressive and frightening book is that many of the pictures are not dated. Some of the illustrations are imaginative reconstructions made some two hundred years after the event which they depict and there is nothing to tell one so anywhere in the book.
And although Mr Haverstick is fair and judi- cious, he does, perhaps, gloss a little the more fearsome aspects of Protestantism. True, he draws attention to their preoccupation with the devil's agents—witches (but here they were neither better nor worse than their Catholic pro- tagonists), and produces a splendid woodcut of the Salem witches dangling on their gibbets. And yet, maybe, he is a little too gentle with the Pro- testants' myth-dominated intellectual world, with their grey pride and their hatred of the world's delights. Nevertheless, these pictures are so vivid and the coverage so comprehensive that it cannot fail to stir the imagination and make one think again about the strangeness of our past. Because it is our past we tend to accept it as normal, as the most natural experience for men and women. We have been taught to revere our martyrs, those brave misguided creatures who suffered the torments of hell for a point of dogma : for a phrase or even a word. In the West, we have come to regard persecution for belief as an almost ineradicable feature of human life—forgetting Greece, forgetting India, forgetting Imperial China. The harsh intoler- ance of communism after all stems from Marx and from Lenin, therefore from the West. To most liberal humanists since Erasmus this aspect of western intellectual life seemed utterly deplorable.
And yet I suspect that the very ferocity of the dogmatic battle may have heightened the part played by ideas, and strengthened the concept that lies at the heart of western science, as well as western philosophy, that truth can be dis- covered, that it is no illusion but an absolute reality. And here the Protestant world was at an advantage over the Catholic. The Protestants placed their emphasis on the individual's need to discover the truth. Once discovered, it dcruld become a prison of the mind, but almost from the moment Luther nailed his theses to the door of Wittenburg Church, Protestant truth became multiple, sects sprang up like weeds, and peasants and craftsmen had to practise their dialectical skills on the gritty knots of dogma— baptism, trans- or con-substantiation, the sacra- ments, the authority of bishops, all required to be argued about as well as believed in.
Philistine, dogmatic, viOlent the Protestant world might be; but basically Protestantism, like the Catholic reaction which followed, was intensely literate. And maybe the chaotic, strident, theological conflicts and the social and political problems which they pose, and the constant arguments which they provoked, were a curiously fertile seedbed for natural science. Certainly theological dispute cannot have been inimical, for the majority of the great scientists of the seventeenth century were, like Newton, deeply religious men, as interlocked in the theological structure of their world as any other believer. This juxtaposition, however, of science with religion in the seventeenth century will always amaze.
And here again we touch on one of the more remarkable aspects of the western intellectual tradition. The time when these dogmatic battles and their attendant cruelties, so luridly illus- trated in this book, were at their most ferocious was also the age of magnificent art, of the spring- time of music, of the rebirth of philosophy and of the foundation of modern science. Indeed it is extraordinary how the West has managed to combine, even in modern times, great barbarity and intellectual splendour within the same ideological framework, often within the same society.
Indeed, cruelty and barbarity, philosophic- ally and intellectually justified, remain a part of our world. And one of the most terrifying aspects of Mr Haverstick's book is its modern relevance. As one turns over the pages, glancing at the burning martyrs, the Victims on the racks, the clubbed missionary, one feels satisfaction that such a world has passed into oblivion. No one is going to sear my flesh because I believe in no part of the Christian myth. And yet . . . are not men and women and children being blown to shreds, burnt Wive and mutilated for
myths equally a matter of faith and not of argu- ment? Freedom for a communist or a capitalist is as explosive as faith was to Catholic or to Protestant. Aggressive economic and social forces can'Still marshal themselves behind dogma that attracts like a magnet the idealism and self-sacrifice of individual men and women.
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