Reformation

The new religions were not the religions of a wealthy upper class but of the urban middle class, the poor in the cities, and the peasants. They carried an appeal to these groups because they gave expression to a new feeling of freedom and independence as well as to

Fromm argues that Lutheranism and Calvinism arose as psycho-social responses to the structural isolation produced by early capitalism, simultaneously articulating new freedom and encoding flight from its burden.

Fromm, Erich, Escape from Freedom, 1941thesis

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the sense of ‘duty’ as we find it pervading the life of modern man from the period of the Reformation up to the present in religious or secular rationalizations, is intensely colored by hostility against the self.

Fromm identifies the Reformation as the historical origin of a compulsive, self-punishing conscience that masquerades as genuine moral duty but is rooted in self-alienation.

Fromm, Erich, Escape from Freedom, 1941thesis

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At the Reformation this problem re-emerged. To say it was not literally body and blood seemed to Catholic thinking to sell out to the view that it was just a representation, which clearly is inadequate to the reality of metaphoric thinking

McGilchrist reads the Reformation’s Eucharistic controversy as evidence of the left hemisphere’s inability to tolerate metaphoric meaning, forcing an either/or literalism that distorts the original intuitive understanding.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis

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we shall try to show that Protestantism and Calvinism, while giving expression to a new feeling of freedom, at the same time constituted an escape from the burden of freedom.

Fromm frames the central psychodynamic paradox of the Reformation: its theology of liberation simultaneously encoded a regressive submission to authority that anticipated modern authoritarian character structures.

Fromm, Erich, Escape from Freedom, 1941thesis

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Ironically, the Reformation would lead to greater doctrinal confusion and to the proliferation of new doctrines as the banners of the various sects which were just as rarefied and tenuous as some of those they sought to replace.

Armstrong diagnoses the Reformation’s theological irony: Luther’s revolt against scholastic aridness produced its own proliferation of equally tenuous doctrines and failed to resolve his own psychological anguish.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993thesis

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A sort of second Reformation was on the way. The Reformation of the sixteenth century could be seen as having involved a shift away from the capacity to understand meta

McGilchrist proposes that the sixteenth-century Reformation initiated a cognitive shift away from metaphoric and holistic understanding, foreshadowing a subsequent ‘second Reformation’ in the Romantic period.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis

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the cognitive structure of Protestantism was closely associated with capitalism: both involve an exaggerated emphasis on individual agency, and a discounting of what might be called ‘communion’.

Drawing on Weber and Bakan, McGilchrist argues that Protestantism’s hemispheric signature — isolated agency over communion — structurally prefigured and enabled modern capitalism’s anti-traditional ethos.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting

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‘I have seen them return from hearing the sermon, as if inspired by an evil spirit’, wrote Erasmus, ‘the faces of all showing a curious wrath and ferocity.’

McGilchrist uses Erasmus’s horror at Reformation fanaticism to illustrate how original impulses toward authentic encounter are hijacked by destructive forces that invert the reformer’s intentions.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting

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Reformers like Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, shared the Protestant emphasis on direct experience of God and the need to appropriate revelation and make it uniquely one’s own.

Armstrong reveals that the Catholic Counter-Reformation absorbed the Protestant accent on personal religious experience, producing its own forms of systematic mysticism comparable to depth-psychological introspection.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993supporting

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Luther’s faith had that compensatory quality. It is particularly important to understand the significance of doubt and the attempts to silence it, because this is not only a problem concerning Luther’s and Calvin’s theology, but it has remained one of the basic problems of modern man.

Fromm identifies the Reformation’s legacy in the existential structure of modern doubt: the compulsion to silence irrational doubt through submission rather than achieving genuine positive freedom.

Fromm, Erich, Escape from Freedom, 1941supporting

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They anticipated, as was seen long ago, the development of the Reformation where also in the beginning there was an attempt to claim that each individual had the right to communicate with the Godhead directly, without the intermediary of a human organization.

Von Franz situates pre-Reformation movements within the individuation-inflected demand for direct access to the divine, reading the Reformation as the institutional crystallization of an archetypal claim already active in heretical spirituality.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980supporting

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We see them again at the time of the Renaissance and Reformation, when south Europe returned to Hellenism and northern Europe returned to Hebrewism.

Hillman maps the Reformation onto the deep psychological oscillation between polytheistic Hellenism and monotheistic Hebrewism, reading it as northern Europe’s characteristic regression toward ego-consolidating unity.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting

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This movement had similarities with the Protestant Reformation in Europe: both had their roots in traditions of protest, both were against the aristocracy and associated with the establishment of royal governments.

Armstrong draws a structural parallel between the Safavid reformation of Shiism and the Protestant Reformation, noting shared patterns of protest, institutionalization, and the suppression of mystical-contemplative orders.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993supporting

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particularly important development for the understanding of the new spirit of the Reformation, since Luther’s attacks were directed particularly against the Schoolmen of the late Middle Ages

Fromm traces the Reformation’s intellectual genealogy through late medieval voluntarism, showing how Scotus, Ockham, and Biel prepared the theological soil for Luther’s revolt against scholastic determinism.

Fromm, Erich, Escape from Freedom, 1941supporting

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The Protestant Reformation changed views towards alcohol and other practices that were considered to be contrary to God’s purpose. Puritans practiced a theology of sin, repentance and strict discipline to ordained Godly principles, which included abstinence from alcohol.

Benda documents the Reformation’s concrete behavioral legacy in Puritan asceticism, tracing how Protestant theology of sin and repentance directly shaped Western attitudes toward substance use and bodily discipline.

Benda, Brent B., Spirituality and Religiousness and Alcohol/Other Drug Problems: Treatment and Recovery Perspectives, 2006supporting

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in Germany, where the Reformation finally would come to its full statement, Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–c. 1327), who was almost precisely a contemporary of Dante, led the way to a new Christian mystic life within

Campbell identifies Meister Eckhart as the spiritual precursor who prepared the German interior-life tradition out of which the Reformation would eventually emerge.

Campbell, Joseph, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964aside

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Calvin was not particularly interested in dogma: his concern was centered on the social, political and economic aspects of religion. He wanted to return to a simpler, scriptural piety but adhered to the doctrine of the Trinity

Armstrong characterizes Calvin’s reforming orientation as fundamentally socio-political rather than dogmatic, while noting his insistence on Trinitarian orthodoxy and his execution of Servetus for its denial.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993aside

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King Wen, from beginning to end, was as calm in carrying out the reformation as a priest holding a sacrificial spoon and chalice without letting them fall.

Huang’s I Ching commentary employs the term ‘reformation’ in a pre-Western context — King Wen’s political transformation — offering a comparative archetype of measured, sacral institutional change.

Alfred Huang, The Complete I Ching: The Definitive Translation, 1998aside

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