So I've recently became interested in the early 1500s and have began pondering this: what if the Protestant reformation never occurred? The POD can be any number of things: Pope Leo X never being elected or never going so far in selling indulgences, Martin Luther never penning the ninety five theses, Luther's ideas never catching on or some other reason. The end result is that the reformation died before it began. What is the short and long-term repercussions of such a momentous change? Would we see Europe remaining Catholic until the present day? Would the Holy Roman Empire as a semi-centralized institution survive without the religious wars of the 1500 and 1600s? Could the various reformists of the renaissance era successfully implement their ideas? Or would we see a more violent era, with various nations attempting to reform the church on a national level?
WI: A stillborn Protestant Reformation?
- Thread starter Emperor Constantine
- Start date
more "national churches"
Even without Luther, Henry VIII is still gonna get tired of his wives and want to divorce them with or without Papal permission...
Maybe we see more instances like this, where rulers challenge the authority of the Papacy, and create in essence their own churches that are Catholic in form (more or less) but controlled at a more national level?
Even without Luther, Henry VIII is still gonna get tired of his wives and want to divorce them with or without Papal permission...
Maybe we see more instances like this, where rulers challenge the authority of the Papacy, and create in essence their own churches that are Catholic in form (more or less) but controlled at a more national level?
There was going to be some kind of reform. Many Catholic thinkers like Erasmus originally supported Luther until he established his own church. Every so often, the Catholic Church had undergone a cleaning of their Augean Stables, usually at the behest of the Holy Roman Emperor with an army in Rome. Some sort of renewal was going to happen. Without the threat of a separate Lutheran or Calvinist Church, the Catholic Church would be look a lot more Protestant and a lot less Council of Trent as it incorporates the dissenters without the fear that the Church is surrendering to them.
There was too much corruption in the Church, and too much money grabbing. That needed to end. The middle classes were now literate and keenly interested in participating more, and in having Bibles in the vernacular. That would need to be accommodated. Major changes are going to occur in some way.
The hard thing about preventing any kind of separate church is that 1) the Holy Roman Empire had too many powers that could shelter and protect a figure like Luther, 2) Germanic nationalism increasingly disliked the idea that their church was ruled by foreigners in Italy, and 3) the prestige of the Papacy was at a near all time low with the Great Schism and other problems. These facts means it will be very hard to prevent some sort of Luther-like figure from appearing in some way. Not impossible, but hard.
There was too much corruption in the Church, and too much money grabbing. That needed to end. The middle classes were now literate and keenly interested in participating more, and in having Bibles in the vernacular. That would need to be accommodated. Major changes are going to occur in some way.
The hard thing about preventing any kind of separate church is that 1) the Holy Roman Empire had too many powers that could shelter and protect a figure like Luther, 2) Germanic nationalism increasingly disliked the idea that their church was ruled by foreigners in Italy, and 3) the prestige of the Papacy was at a near all time low with the Great Schism and other problems. These facts means it will be very hard to prevent some sort of Luther-like figure from appearing in some way. Not impossible, but hard.
JJohnson
Banned
If the Catholic Church adopted the ideas of the Bohemian movement (priests can marry, stop teaching on Purgatory, vernacular teaching and Bibles) and the Protestant movement (stop selling indulgences, salvation through faith alone, not works, and cessation of the veneration of saints/Mary), over the course of may a century or two, there would not have been a Protestant Reformation, as all the complaints would've been answered.
And that would never happen because there were always too many hardliners on the other end to stop it.
Look, I know many of the devout Catholics on the board don't want to hear it, but in the end, it's like gravity--as literacy increases, the number and severity of challenges to what had become the Catholic tradition will likewise increase. And while it's not a guarantee they'll cause a schism... it's pretty damn likely.
They could have, but as said, it'd be a rather severe challenge to Catholic implicit doctrine. Protestants gladly admit they challenged that, saying the return to (claimed) biblical values was a good thing, but the idea of a living tradition in addition to the fixed biblical tradition is rather central to catholic thought.
Now, reform is almost inevitable; much as the Council of Trent was not accepting of protestantism, it did reform and reorganise a lot of things that were just plain not working or corrupt (like the whole system of priestly education and such).
Adding bibles in vernacular and stopping the sale of indulgences can probably slot in under such reforms, but actually altering some core thinking for basically no reasons seems unlikely.
Which indeed means either Catholicism stamps out the heretics (something it was very unsuited to do in the 1500's thanks to the sheer corrupt mess around the actual dogmatic disputes - it took Trent's reforms to really get it going) or the Protestants eventually split with the Church, as Luther's ideas are not too impossible to come to repeatedly - until someone manages to escape the stamping out and gets powerful backing.
Yeah...no.
Reform of some kind is inevitable. The Catholic Church being wholly coopted and turned into Lutheran/Calvinist+Pope is not going to happen, though. Too much tradition in the organization and among the people and traditional power structures to allow it.
Ok, first off, that's a remarkably deterministic and untrue analysis of Catholic dogma, doctrine, and organization in the time (at least in regards to reform in general) and I'm going to disagree with you on the idea that a schism was "pretty damn likely".
Yes, there were certainly a great many challenges coming to the Church in a time when mass literacy and printing was suddenly available to diversify sources and control of information. It's not widely acknowledged these days, but there were translations of the bible into the vernacular. The issue was that the Church argued they needed extensive vetting and checking to insure accuracy, so very few were made and those were only available to intellectuals and upper classes who usually could read latin (or hire someone who could) could get them, which sort of defeated the whole process. Translating into the vernacular and a sort-of-democratization of biblical printing and understanding is inevitable, but how the Church reacts to it is not.
The biggest issue for many reformers, before Luther and the proliferation of millenialist and radical(as in radical change, not necessarily violent) Christians, was Church corruption. That's often been an issue with the Church, and there have been plenty of internal Reforms in reaction to it. Like as not, without the example of Luther's split, it's equally likely that the Church (at least at the end of the whole ordeal) is united and co-opts many reforms into its structure
Now, a struggle with temporal powers over the influence and power of the Church could lead to a traditional schism or national churches, with the two churches not having significant doctrinal differences (think Orthodox autocephalous patriarchs) is far more likely than the complete break of OTL or a united and barely changed Church.
I was going to comment something like what you said. When people say that it was going to happen a king like Henry VIII they are likely to forget that the church of Henry wasn't formed as it is today, for many decades it could have become anything, even something like a greek orthodox church.
Heresies and schisms happened and went away many times in the history of the church.
The reformation did not originate from Luther alone.
The latin Christendom had regularly been shaken by reformation movements since at least the middle of the 11th century (gregorian reformation).
In the 13th century, you had many movements of reformation : some, like the franciscan monks, succeeded in being integrated by the catholic church ; others, were condemned as heretics.
In the 14th and early 15 th century, there was the reformation movements of Wycliff in England and Hus in Bohemia.
In the 16th century, Zwingli did not need Luther to have his own ideas about religious reformation.
So, it is quite certain that, given the spreading of printing that enabled instructed people to publish and communicate their ideas, you will have some kind of protestant reformation in Europe.
And you can be certain that there will be princes that will ride the reformation movement in order to take seize church properties for their profit.
The latin Christendom had regularly been shaken by reformation movements since at least the middle of the 11th century (gregorian reformation).
In the 13th century, you had many movements of reformation : some, like the franciscan monks, succeeded in being integrated by the catholic church ; others, were condemned as heretics.
In the 14th and early 15 th century, there was the reformation movements of Wycliff in England and Hus in Bohemia.
In the 16th century, Zwingli did not need Luther to have his own ideas about religious reformation.
So, it is quite certain that, given the spreading of printing that enabled instructed people to publish and communicate their ideas, you will have some kind of protestant reformation in Europe.
And you can be certain that there will be princes that will ride the reformation movement in order to take seize church properties for their profit.
the idea of reforming the Church is inevitable. too much corruption and venality among many of the clerics, too much yearning for something better from the other clerics, and too much desire for power and riches among the nobles.
the specific trigger, and therefore the character of the reformation, may be changed, tho'.
like perhaps Erasmus and the Humanists taking the lead of moderate reform, rather than the apocalyptic fury of Calvin and Zwingli?
the specific trigger, and therefore the character of the reformation, may be changed, tho'.
like perhaps Erasmus and the Humanists taking the lead of moderate reform, rather than the apocalyptic fury of Calvin and Zwingli?
FrozenMix
Banned
The Church was undergoing constant reforms often based around the political situation of the day, and had been doing so since Pope Gregory, and it is likely that issues regarding the rampant corruption and poor education and devotion of clergy were going to be addressed without Luther lighting the fire, and likely it would have happened sooner rather than later. Some of the most conservative voices in the Church had already spoken out against the corruption of the Borgias in particular and saw the need for systematic reform.
Protestantism was not destined, and its more out there ideologies like predestination and justification by faith only rather than good works, as well as more egalitarian class roles (which of course became lost over time) were more addendums of the reformers themselves, who used the desire for vernacular bibles and less corruption, very reasonable and honestly, inevitable, changes to mold their new faiths.
The church being a uniting European force is something taht I think was inevitable to go by the wayside, as the development of nationstates and professional armies made Papal control of all of that land just unreasonable. A Henry VIII departure, maybe not over divorce, but one that leads to a division from Rome that stands the test of time, was very likely to happen at some point. From there, various theological changes could develop, but its hard to pinpoint what they might be.
Also, treatment of the Jews might change. The Catholic Church was actually probably a lot more tolerant of the Jews than many of their Protestant counterparts (see "On The Jews and their Lies" by Luther and bulls issued in reaction to Plague related pogroms by the Papacy), and whether this is because of German tradition or not is hard to pinpoint. But maybe Jews attain more rights a lot sooner.
Protestantism was not destined, and its more out there ideologies like predestination and justification by faith only rather than good works, as well as more egalitarian class roles (which of course became lost over time) were more addendums of the reformers themselves, who used the desire for vernacular bibles and less corruption, very reasonable and honestly, inevitable, changes to mold their new faiths.
The church being a uniting European force is something taht I think was inevitable to go by the wayside, as the development of nationstates and professional armies made Papal control of all of that land just unreasonable. A Henry VIII departure, maybe not over divorce, but one that leads to a division from Rome that stands the test of time, was very likely to happen at some point. From there, various theological changes could develop, but its hard to pinpoint what they might be.
Also, treatment of the Jews might change. The Catholic Church was actually probably a lot more tolerant of the Jews than many of their Protestant counterparts (see "On The Jews and their Lies" by Luther and bulls issued in reaction to Plague related pogroms by the Papacy), and whether this is because of German tradition or not is hard to pinpoint. But maybe Jews attain more rights a lot sooner.
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Yes, and the REASON they had to keep implementing reforms over and over and over again, was because corruption crept back in quickly. There was no accountability in the Hierarchy, really, and no competition.
Yes, it probably was. With the rise of a middle class, literacy and printing presses, people start comparing what the Church is teaching to what the Bible says. Unfortunately, there's a huge gap, and simply appealing to Apostolic Authority or to Tradition is NOT going to suffice for people who have learned to think for themselves.
Whether, of course, it turns out anything like Lutheranism or Calvinism, is another question, but SOMETHING will happen.
FrozenMix
Banned
I did say that. What I was pointing to is that change was likely going to come from a strong monarch and a strong nation state that the Church was an obstacle for. It could have been Henry VIII's marital problems, or maybe land related issues with the French, or maybe even if the Church reforms in ways the ultra conservative Spanish are uncomfortable with, you could see change coming from the forces of Iberian reaction.
I agree that a departure from a unified Catholic Europe was going to happen- feudalism and manorialism becoming less and less tenable ensured that. Literacy, the middle class, all of that, yes, it helps smooth the process. But change is likely going to come from above rather than below if Protestantism is strangled in its politically fractious German and Swiss crib.
When Protestantism succeeded in modern nation states, it was because the Kings wanted more power and the clergy felt too disconnected from Rome. The kind of ground up, populist, Protestantism in Germany and Switzerland succeeded because the political structure of the region did not allow it to be crushed effectively. If that goes away, the severance from Rome is going to come from the government. And the associated repression of jilted Catholics may be more or less bloody depending on who the King is and his relationship with the nobility.
Yeesh, sounds like somebody woke up on the wrong side of the reformation this morning
.Protestantism wasn't a simple result of people gaining knowledge, it was a result of people gaining a certain amount of knowledge, and any more or any less would have produced a different result. Taken alone the Bible can be (and often has been) used to justify almost literally anything. Giving translated bibles to nominally Christian people and telling them "Form an opinion on this" will likely cause as many answers as there are participants, which helps to explain why there are hundreds (thousands?) of Protestant sects today. Add the historical context in and suddenly the Catholic position actually makes a good deal of sense and can more than hold its own against Protestantism, but the trick is getting people not to launch a massive new religious movement in the time between the vernacular printing of Bibles and the vernacular printing of history books.
It also helps that Luther had a massive cult of personality and the support of a good many princes who realized what a sound investment Protestantism could be (no monasteries, all hierarchies based on the papacy are no longer valid, ect.).
Anyways, to answer the OP, as others have said reform was coming either way, and to those saying that reform would be short lived, it wasn't IOTL. OTL's counter-reformation likely becomes TTL's reformation, with a major house-cleaning to bring the corruption to heel on a more permanent basis. As the Papacy looses temporal power it gradually becomes easier to keep a lid on the corruption (and the Papacy, and all the Italian states for that matter, were already pretty well screwed in the long run by the 1500s).
On the flip side, the rise of absolutism will lead to more and more independent minded, Henry VIII style monarchs, but without a doctrinal movement to go along with it the likeliness of a permanent schism that outlives the king and pope who start it is fairly unlikely. Even so, the kings will push more and more, and I suspect something akin to Gallicanism will dominate in many countries, and perhaps a few will even gain long term autocephaly (whether it is with Papal acceptance is uncertain, though even ones started without the Pope's consent may be given his acceptance later if the doctrinal differences don't surface, as happened in the Eastern Churches IOTL).
So basically, most likely a church that isn't cut down in size will be cut down in centralization, but there isn't something about having knowledge or access to Bibles that makes Catholicism untenable, which by the way should be obvious given that Catholics make up a slim majority of all Christians worldwide even IOTL, which honestly is something of a Protestant wank (The US, Britain, and Germany all being protestant dominated was really a rather incredibly good turnout all things considered, being a superpower and the two strongest great powers in Europe respectively).
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Delta Force
Banned
They might not have been developed for this, but public policy models would certainly be giving indicators of change occurring around that time. The Church authorities had a monopoly on knowledge, and there was a certain image of it. There's a reason why the technocratic elites are occasionally referred to as a "priesthood", some issues are simply arcane. When the printing presses started producing vernacular bibles and people started questioning the image of the Church, including the elite, the situation was ripe for change.
Of course, the models are for policymaking by modern advanced democracies, so it doesn't really account for the very high resistance to change of a religion. With change all but impossible, it shunted off elsewhere.
Of course, the models are for policymaking by modern advanced democracies, so it doesn't really account for the very high resistance to change of a religion. With change all but impossible, it shunted off elsewhere.
This is effectively a meaningless statement.
EVERY organization made and staffed by humans, particularly those related to governing an aspect of life, becomes corrupt with time. It's a natural consequence of people and groups learning the rules and limits of the organization and taking advantage for their own personal gain. So too with the Catholic Church.
It's not like Protestant churches were immune to corruption by secular forces and big personalities either IOTL, even at the very beginning. The idea that the Protestant Reformation was the only natural reaction to corruption is patently false.
That's a pretty simplistic reading of the Reformation, which is, as all history, a convoluted affair with tons of influences.
There were plenty of well-known intellectuals and fundamentalist movements that pushed back at parts of the Church's contemporary traditions even within that time. In fact, looking at pure numbers, more of the most heavily educated critics of the Church remained as Catholic as the poor illiterate masses not concerned with the vernacular.
Much of the Protestant Reformation ties to the rise of the middle class, but more broadly to the resistance to traditional power structures and ideas in general, and there's no reason that couldn't have taken one of many other forms within the context of an internal Catholic struggle rather than a complete schism and proliferation of Protestant movements that wholly broke away.
Take, for example, Zwingli's rise to power. I'm not saying there wasn't a theological and religious base of support for him, but one of the primary reasons he got the converts he did was because he opposed the mercenary system. The mercenary system had become extremely powerful and influential in Switzerland even in that time and allowed rural cantons (who would often become Catholic cantons of later years) to hold equal or greater influence than the more populous and more trade-oriented cantons like Bern or Zurich. Naturally, Bern and Zurich wanted more power within the confederation to pursue their own goals and were opposed to the excesses of the system, while other cantons refused. Power, centralization, breaking free from "foreign control" exemplified by both the Pope AND secular powers that paid for mercenaries, these were all incredibly big parts of Zwingli's reformation.
Appointing the whole Reformation, even a majority, just to the rise of vernacular bibles and the divide between what the bible says and what the Church developed over time is just painting with broad strokes.
Which is the one thing just about everybody in this thread agrees on. SOME reform, SOME breaks from tradition and real effort to fight corruption were inevitable. The form that they'll take, particularly in a complete schism and proliferation of *Protestant churches, on the other hand, is by no means guaranteed or more likely than other possibilities that involve a more "Catholic"(though not necessarily Catholic as we know it, or united) western Europe.
None of that, please. It's a contentious issue involving religion, no need to get snarky.Yeesh, sounds like somebody woke up on the wrong side of the reformation this morning
Besides that, I tend to agree with most of what you said. Except the idea that OTL is a Protestant wank, that's pretty speculative. Once the cat's out of the bag and the movements were established there were quite a lot of ways for the theological disputes to have taken shape on both sides of the divide.
The problem with that model(aside from vastly oversimplifying the causes of the Reformation to one of many) is that it presupposes that the Church was this monolithic wall of opinions without internal conflict on the issue, which was not the case at all.
As others have noted, corruption, alienation from the far-away Pope of Rome , and even some doctrinal and ritual traditions were under scrutiny even from conservative members of the hierarchy in the period before the Reformation. That's not even taking into account secular forces pushing on the Church from without that could affect change in how that information is distributed in their own way.
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Sorry, his post (or at least that line of it) just sounded so much like an unsupported pro-Protestant opinion (since the implication that one side is right is inherently un-provable and thus hogwash from a historical perspective) that I couldn't help myself.
Protestants make up a minority of Christianity, never numbering as much as 10% of the global population, and yet they can claim both the largest colonial empire and one of only two true superpowers in their camp. Not sure how that's speculative really, Protestant nations have had rather incredible fortunes on the world stage. The only real way I could think of to increase their fortunes is to give them France or Austria (incredibly unlikely due to social and government factors BTW), but Iberia, Italy, and the Iberian colonial empires weren't going anywhere.
I agree with Jord, big time. The Reformation was incredibly complex thing that ended up being a piggy back for a whole host of other issues, and that goes for all sides of the many divides. If the Church was a bit more pro-active on certain issues, like corruption and allowing more local control, it would have evaporated much of the mass support for the Protestant movements. And that's just two of the issues. Never mind things like the mercenary issue in Switzerland, more control by secular powers from local lords resisting monarchical centralization to those kings trying to reign in their nobility, and so on and so forth.
It was a highly dynamic period for Christianity, and it's a shame that more alternate outcomes aren't explored further.
It was a highly dynamic period for Christianity, and it's a shame that more alternate outcomes aren't explored further.
I'm not sure why the Iberian empires are inevitable while the British Empire is a "Protestant wank." I think they all are "wanks". An observer in 1400 probably would not have predicted any of England, Castille or Portugal to become a global power. These were nations on the fringe of Europe. Both Spain and Portugal benefitted from their share of good fortune putting those empires together, and around a third of all Catholics worldwide live in their successor states in Latin America.
In Europe itself, Protestantism could have expanded further. In the late 16th century it had footholds in Belgium, Bohemia, Poland, southern Germany and some enclaves in France, but lost those from the Counter-Reformation onward. It also went from being the majority faith in Hungary to a minority (though still sizable). It was not necessarily inevitable that the House of Hapsburg would be incredibly powerful and strongly committed to Catholicism during this time.
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