Searching the past for the “pure” church. The Italian humanists had tried to restore the “pure” classical heritage by removing layer upon layer of accretions deposited by the “Dark Ages.” Such an endeavor held no fascination for Martin Luther, who viewed the classical achievements as products of feeble human reason, devoid of spiritual purpose. But Luther engaged in his own work of restoration when he called for a return to the “pure” holy Christian church, that of Christ and his apostles. He and other reformers, laboring to remove the “corrupt” layers of tradition accumulated over centuries, realized the need for historical studies that would help to reestablish the pure and timeless faith and church. Such an attitude, of course, would deny the legitimacy of development in history.
Philip Melanchthon, Luther’s friend and a systematic theologian, soon grasped that the key battle between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism would be fought over the validity of church tradition, and he saw to it that history, as the mighty weapon in that struggle, was given a prominent place in the new Protestant universities at Marburg an der Lahn, Konigsberg, and Jena. He himself lectured on history. It also helped that Johann Carion published a world chronicle from a Lutheran perspective and had great success with this Chronica. Melanchthon reworked parts of that chronicle into a useful textbook, but left to his son-in-law Casper Peucer both the completion of the task and the continuation of the text. By then, the originally brief German-language chronicle had grown into a four-volume Latin world chronicle. As it grew in length, it emphasized the fateful distinction, drawn from Luther’s teaching, between sacred history (depicting God’s design for human redemption, the Heilsorder) and human or profane history (God’s design for an orderly human life on earth, the Erhaltungsorder). The distinction represented another attempt to resolve the problem facing Christian theologians and historians of how to relate temporal institutions and events to the divine design for universal redemption. The new definition of that relationship had sharp repercussions. In an unexpected parallel to humanist historiography, Peucer’s edition of Melanchthon’s chronicle made a sharp distinction between the two orders, the sacred and the profane. Protestant historiography thus came to a fork in the road leading to two entirely separate histories: one ecclesiastical, telling the story of Christ’s church, and one mundane, concerned with the state as God’s instrument. Although God still linked the two, this link was deemphasized with every passing century.
After the Lutheran reform movement had matured into an institutional church, a group of Lutheran scholars under the leadership of Matthias Flacius Illyricus (Vlach from Istria) set out on a systematic exploration of the Christian church’s past. The xQ%xXin% Magdeburg Centuries (1559-74) were to document the Lutheran assertions of a step-by-step corruption of the teachings of Christ and of the simple early church by the Roman hierarchy. That theme had already been set forth by two Englishmen. Robert Barnes ascribed all guilt to the popes, whom he appropriately vilified. Luther cherished Barnes’s Lives of the Roman Pontiffs, which simply magnified all papal weaknesses described in Platina’s Lives of the Popes and in other works. John Bale, a more systematic church historian, blamed the whole “Roman Church” for the evil that befell the faith in the past. He eventually assisted the writers of the Magdeburg Centuries.
The Magdeburg Centuries traced in thirteen volumes the development of the church until 1300, hailing all dissenters and condemning those who supposedly contributed to the continuous corruption of the church—particularly the popes, who were denounced as the Anti-Christ. When Flacius found no convenient points of division for the volumes, he decided to have each volume treat one century and thereby pioneered one of the most durable concepts in Western historiography. Each volume, or century, had chapters dealing with standard topics: the propagation of the church, the fate of the church, doctrines, heresies, rites and ceremonies, governance of the church, councils, lives of bishops and theologians, heresies, martyrs, miracles, Jewish affairs, other religions, and poUtical matters. While the work was not pleasingly written, its massive scholarship provided Protestant preachers and scholars with a vast collection of data.
Because it threatened the concept of an ongoing tradition. Catholics could hardly let the Lutheran interpretation of the church’s past go unchallenged. First Onofrio Panvinio, the highly esteemed antiquarian and editor of an updated version of Platina’s Lives of the Popes, set to work but died before he could accomplish anything. Then, in 1571, a papal commission selected another Oratorian, Caesar Baronius, to write the Catholic counterpart to the Magdeburg Centuries. Baronius’s Ecclesiastical Annals (with the first volume published in 1588) attempted to demonstrate above all that it was wrong to reject the medieval developments in the church, since the postapostolic changes were not man-made innovations but clarifications, interpretations, and special applications of Christ’s teachings undertaken with the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The emphasis on continuity made it fitting that Baronius, although he cherished humanist learning, chose the old-fashioned annalistic form. But Baronius’s critical spirit was thoroughly up-to-date with its careful evaluation of sources and expurgation of undocumented traditions. The Annals were even popular, as the many editions show. So serious, so pious, so concerned with accuracy, and so generous in the use of documents was Baronius that his work not only buttressed the faith of Catholics but on occasion provided information even to Protestant scholars.
Still, the Ecclesiastical Annals were a Roman Catholic compendium and Baronius had erred a number of times. His work received a Protestant answer from Isaac Casaubon, an outstanding Calvinist scholar of languages, who pointed out errors in Baronius’s Greek, Hebrew, and Latin and inferred from them that the whole text of the Ecclesiastical Annals was unreliable. The Exercitationes in Baronium, Casaubon’s answer, took eight hundred pages to refute Baronius’s first volume alone and remained a fragment. With Casaubon ended the attempts to win the battle over the proper church tradition by using history. Important as the ecclesiastical histories were, they ignored the involvement of the masses in the controversy. If history were to remain instrumental in the Reformation period, it needed to appeal to a wider public.
The battle over the proper tradition took on a unique shape in the gradual emergence of the Anglican church. From the beginning of this church, its articles of faith, its constitution, and its practices were debated and decided in the context of English society with its currents and cross-currents. Early Protestants like William Tyndale considered the Bible the only authority and the apostolic church the only proper model. The medieval centuries demonstrated the “great decline,” a period in which the “visible” church degenerated through the “great conspiracy” of the papacy. However, the Anglican church strove for a greater continuity, first by extending the period of the “ideal” apostolic church by about 600 years, and then by stressing the distinction between the church as the mystical body of Christ, removed from all change and doubt and subject only to the few great turning points in sacred history, and the visible church, existing in specific societies and states. The visible church, being a part of the world, changed only in its nonessential aspects (the adiaphora). In this sense Richard Hooker defined the Anglican church as a historical institution, occupying a middle ground between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.
Celebrating the Elizabethan religious settlement was a work with an accent on antiquities and scholarly method, the De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae (1572), compiled by a battery of scholars led by the learned archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker. They had rescued large amounts of source material from being destroyed, collected it in the official residence of the archbishop, and systematically edited and used it. Parker had set out to serve the Christian faith and ended up praising its English version:
Because neither my health nor my quiet would suffer me to be a common preacher, yet I thought it not unfit for me to be otherwise occupied in some points of religion; for my meaning was, by this my poor collection thus caused to be printed.. .to note at what time Augustine my first predecessor came into this land, what religion he brought in with him, and how it continued, how it was fortified and increased, which by most of my predecessors may appear, as I could gather of such rare and written authors that came to my hands, until the days of King Henry the Vllth, when the religion began to grow better, and more agreeable to the Gospel.®
English pride was not badly served either, as Parker and his associates became interested in the early Anglo-Saxon language and in editing Saxon sources and medieval English chronicles.
On martyrs and councils. Discussions of essentials and adiaphora and lengthy, scholarly church histories did not move the masses. Hence, it seems surprising that the most popular historical work concerning the church in England was John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of These Latter and Perilous Days, an EngUsh version of the original Latin work. The people called it simply the Book of Martyrs, although in its final form the work constituted a full-fledged ecclesiastical history. Foxe demonstrated that the new English Protestant church was no sudden or accidental occurrence but had its own continuity if Wycliff and the Lollards were taken as the medieval supports for a bridge leading back to the “pure” apostolic church. But such ecclesiastical history would not have stirred the masses had it not been for Foxe’s martyrology. For centuries the stories of the early martyrs had inspired Christians. Now, both Protestants and Catholics found the same inspiration in the lives of their contemporary martyrs. In the 1500s Jean Crespin had issued a history of the “new” martyrs, “victims of the Anti-Christ”—that is, of the Roman Catholic church—and Baronius had countered with a Roman Martyrology. But Foxe’s Book of Martyrs gripped more readers than all other such works. A true history for the masses, it was selective, partisan, and highly effective.
While martyrs received their share of attention, one of the more important religious settlements of the sixteenth century, the Council of Trent, suffered historiographical neglect for many years. Its first major historical account came from the Venetian Paolo Sarpi, a reform-minded, ascetic member of the Servite order. When his History of the Council of Trent appeared in 1619, it bore the traces of Sarpi’s training and life experience. Humanist historiography had impressed on him the centrality of politics, a view strengthened by his love of the Venetian patria and by his deep resentment of the political use of papal power. Thus, he depicted the council essentially as a power struggle even in matters of theology. The importance of the council for the historia sacra, or simply its religious significance, could never be ascertained from the blow-by-blow account that Sarpi distilled from the documents available to him. In its fact-laden way it reflected the preferences of the age, which had come to interpret religious controversies politically. Only many years later did the Jesuit Sforza Pallavicino attempt to refute Sarpi’s interpretation in his Story of the Council of Trent (1656-57). He could not counteract completely Sarpi’s influence, since Sarpi appealed to Protestants, who liked his basically derogatory attitude, and to the growing number of skeptics among intellectuals, who cherished church history as expose.
World History
