There are a few books in one’s life that create an indelible impression, so that one never forgets the basic argument.  Among the books that for me fall into this category is one entitled The Discovery of the Individual 1050-1200 by Colin Morris. The principle insight of the book is to show how the roots of the Renaissance and the Reformation are to be found in intellectual developments in a number of centres of learning in early mediaeval Europe.  For me, the appeal of the book was in the way that it explained the cultural and philosophical meaning of ‘individual’ and how this idea needed to be discovered or re-discovered.  Before 1050, so the book claims, the intellectual traditions of Western Europe were unable to entertain any kind of novelty in their thinking.  Everything was derivative of what had gone before.  In order for the great explosion of revolutionary ideas that we call the Renaissance to emerge, there had to be, over a couple of centuries, a gradual building up of new intellectual traditions where scholars and thinkers could start to think for themselves.  In the modern parlance, there had to be an increasing tolerance for ‘thinking outside the box’. The new revolution in thought, which collectively is referred to as the Renaissance, burst into full view in the late 15^th century.  The world, especially in its art, literature and political thinking, has never been the same since.

These new traditions of thought and artistic achievement in so many arenas of human enterprise during the Renaissance were movements made possible by a relatively few brave pioneers being given permission in various centres to experiment and think new thoughts.  The Renaissance itself was given impetus and energy by the patronage of popes, kings and princes.  Many fell over themselves to be seen to celebrate this new movement in both learning and artistic discovery.  St Peter’s in Rome was built as much to symbolise the achievements of this new age of human endeavour and creativity as it was erected to celebrate the glory of God.  New thought being applied to art, literature and architecture was one thing.  Applying it to the religious traditions which had been handed down from the Middle Ages was a much more contentious process.  It was one thing for a pope to sponsor the music of Palestrina or the art of Michelangelo; it was quite another to listen to new religious ideas that might challenge the power complex of the medieval Papal establishment.  New thought could be tolerated, even encouraged, but not if it challenged religious privilege and power.

The personalities that created the Protestant Reformation can be seen to emerge from the same creative impulses that nurtured Da Vinci and Botticelli.  Of course, they, Luther, Calvin, Arminius etc., excelled in quite different spheres of human achievement and activity, but they had this one thing in common.  Each had given themselves permission to take forward the task of thinking new thoughts in ways that had never happened before.  Even fifty years before in Europe, any new thought in matters of Church discipline would have been met with harsh treatment from all sides, whether secular or religious.  Luther, in the 1520s, was able to find allies among the secular authorities to protect him. There was, providentially, a friendly German prince prepared to give him hospitality in a castle for a number of years, keeping him away from the many who would have preferred him to be arrested and killed.  The religious wars that followed the Protestant Reformation were long and bloody.  It was not until the middle of the 17^th century that continental Europe reverted to a semblance of an uneasy peace between the Catholic and Protestant nations. 

Many of us have read accounts of this period of history, 1530-1648.  On continental Europe it is sometimes summed up and described a time of religious wars.  The whole period does little to honour the cause of the Christian faith.  But one thing I take from the story of the Reformation is the way that each side in the dispute, Catholic and Protestant, embodied some part of the truth.  For the purpose of this blog post, I am going to ignore the theological disputes, such as biblical authority and the nature of salvation.   What comes out of my attempt to view the Reformation dispassionately (if that is possible!) and informed by the perspective of Morris’ book, is to note two distinct ways of being human and Christian. I risk a verbal battering from my historically informed readers when I liken the traditional Catholic style of practising the Christian faith as being in some sense ‘tribal’.  By this word I am referring to the fact that most people practised their faith as part of a community or nation of faith.  Catholicism was part of the fabric of the social order.  The Catholic faithful were not expected to look back to some conversion event in their lives.  It was part of what it meant to be alive and being part of their society.  Conforming to the authority of the priest was in many ways an extension of their submission to a feudal lord.  In return the Catholic faithful were offered the assurance that, provided they fulfilled the obligations of the Church, their place in heaven was secure.

The Protestant way of doing religion, again stripped of its doctrinal wordiness, honours the part of us that questions and argues our way to truth and faith.  When we use the word protest, it brings to mind an argumentative, forceful style.  We know also that, in practice, many protestant churches today are good at providing a non-demanding reassuring form of faith, but this was not true of the early pioneers.  They fought for their version of truth, using rhetoric, verbal and physical force to protest what they believed to be true about God and his relationship with humankind.  None of them seem to have been easy characters and they certainly did not seek for a comfortable life.   John Knox, for example, could be brutish and unpleasant by all accounts but, for good and ill, his version of Christianity remains influential in Scotland.  It is my thought that each of these two tendencies or ways of doing religion can exist in us simultaneously.  We swing between wanting a safe and predictable safe way of practising the faith and a more argumentative style.  Part of us is perhaps roused to a state of passion by the claims of Christianity.  We may sometimes even feel that we want to stand on a street corner challenging others to wake up from their complacency about spiritual matters.

My suggestion is that many of us have a Catholic sub-personality alongside a Protestant one.  This may seem to suggest that I think there is something wrong with us.  What I think I am saying is that we oscillate between different modes of functioning in our religious expression.   In other words, some of the time we need reassurance and comfort from our faith, but on other occasions, the faith we have leads to protest and strong affirmation. This is probably also true of our political thinking.  I sometimes say that I am, in my politics, intellectually left wing but temperamentally right wing.  The important thing is we can learn to be honest about what we think on religious topics and how, sometimes, two quite opposite thoughts can be felt by us to be true at the same time.  Those familiar with the novels of Anthony Trollope will remember the theological stance of Mr Arabin who became Dean of Barchester. 

The book, The Discovery of the Individual, helped me to become aware of the dual nature of my personality.  Two aspects of the same individual, the part that prefers the corporate safe way of doing Christianity and the forceful individualistic way, may live side by side.  I quickly add that this piece of spiritual self-awareness was probably nowhere in the author’s mind when he wrote his important work.   Nevertheless, I find it helpful to be reminded that I can swing between these two manifestations of religious personality.  I should not expect to live in one spiritual place all the time.  It also helps me to value another who chooses at any one moment to live in a different place along this continuum between the positions I have loosely called catholic and protestant.  That designation is not meant to be a scientific or psychological description of two types of personality but perhaps a convenient shorthand to describe two ways of practising the Christian faith.   Probably we need to recognise both styles, in ourselves but also in the wider Church.    I am not minded to emphasise either one as a way to exclude the other as both have a part to play in the wholeness that God is calling us to fulfil in our membership of his Church.