The Movement of World Revolution

3. Rationalism and Revolution

36 3 Rationalism and Revolution When one considers the progress of the Catholic revival in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the apparent strength of religious faith and practice both in Catholic and Protestant Europe at that time, it is difficult to understand how European culture ever became secularized. In the middle of the seventeenth century Europe, and America also, were divided between opposing forms of religion and culture, but both of them—the Baroque culture of the South and the Protestant culture of the North—were intensely religious and sincerely Christian. Yet in a century or a century and a half all this was changed and Europe had become the Europe that we know. Religion had become a matter of private opinion and the public life of the state and the intellectual community of culture had become almost completely secularized. This change was even more revolutionary than that of the sixteenth century, although it was less spectacular. For it was not the result of the French Revolution. The spiritual revolution had been already accomplished before there was any question of a political one. How then are we to explain so vast a change? It was not, as is sometimes supposed, the direct consequence of the Reformation, nor was it due to the political or cultural victory of the Protestant North over the Catholic South. Yet on the other hand it had no roots within the Baroque culture itself, for the latter had attained a state of social and political equilibrium which might have endured for centuries, if it had not been disturbed from without. Spain and Italy were as impervious to Protestantism as Scotland and Scandinavia were impervious to Catholicism . And so too in America there was no possibility of mutual Rationalism and Revolution 37 influence or understanding between the Protestants of New England and the Catholics of New France or New Spain. But to this rule there was one great exception. Throughout the decisive period in which the new Catholic and Protestant cultures were becoming stabilized, the largest national state in Western Europe remained divided between the two religions. The French religious wars of the sixteenth century had ended in a kind of stalemate by which the leader of the Protestants became the representative of French national unity by himself becoming a Catholic, while at the same time guaranteeing the rights and privileges of the Protestant minority. The Edict of Nantes not only secured freedom of conscience for the Protestants; it recognized their corporate existence as an organized society—a state within a state—with their own religious and political assemblies, their own fortresses and practically their own army. Nevertheless these very generous terms did not represent a Protestant triumph, but rather a victory for the party of conciliation, the so-called Politiques, who were prepared to sacrifice the principle of religious unity to the cause of national unity and who found their leader and representative in Henry IV himself, who repeatedly changed his religion according to political circumstances; once insincerely in order to save his life after the massacre of St. Bartholomew and once with apparent sincerity at the moment when his conversion gave him the crown and defeated the European hegemony of Spanish Catholicism. For Henry IV the re-establishment of national unity after forty years of civil war was the first essential. If his subjects were good Frenchmen they could be Catholic or Protestant, but they must be Frenchmen first. And this point of view made a strong appeal to a generation which had been ruined by the miseries of civil war, deafened by religious controversy and touched in their national pride by foreign intervention. They welcomed the restoration of the royal power as an impartial arbiter which would be strong enough to impose peace on the rival Churches and parties which were tearing France in pieces. It is true that the age of Henry IV and Richelieu witnessed a great movement of Catholic revival which produced a galaxy of saints and mystics , like the Spanish revival in the previous century. But unlike the latter it was not a universal movement which embraced and inspired 38 The Movement of World Revolution the whole culture, but a minority movement, which like the Puritan movement in England was a protest against the secularizing tendencies of the national culture. This analogy with Puritanism is especially visible on the left wing of the French Catholic revival which...