The Movement of World Revolution

2. Renaissance and Reformation

21 2 Renaissance and Reformation The period of modern history which extends from the Reformation to the French Revolution is a very difficult one to study and, I believe, there is a real danger that it may become increasingly neglected, especially by Catholic scholars. In the past and, indeed, until quite recently this period was regarded as “Modern History” and it was the main object of study not only by the popular literary historians, like Macaulay and Carlyle and Froude, but no less by the great men of learning, like Ranke and Acton, whose vast knowledge and powers of research have never been surpassed. But today Modern History has acquired a new meaning. More and more historians are devoting themselves to the study of the immediate past. New fields of study are being brought into the domain of history, while the wars and revolutions through which the world has passed in the present generation have changed our perspective and have made the Europe of the seventeenth century as remote as—and to Catholics, perhaps, more remote than—that of the thirteenth century. These centuries no longer belong to Modern History. Although they are not medieval in the technical sense, they are as it were a new middle age which separates modern Europe from medieval Christendom. Nevertheless, though this period no longer belongs to “modern history,” it still retains its importance since it is the age out of which modern Europe and the modern world have come. It is the age that saw the creation of the national state, the creation of modern science and the flowering of the modern vernacular literatures. Above all it is the age which saw the expansion of Western culture from its original West European centre to America and to the world. And it has a pecu- 22 The Movement of World Revolution liar and tragic interest for Christians, because it was the age which saw the division of Christendom, when the Catholic and Protestant worlds assumed their existing forms and when Western culture began to undergo that process of secularization which has only been completed in our own days. If we do not understand this age, we cannot be said to understand European culture at all or American culture either. Yet it is a very difficult age for us to understand; in some ways even more difficult than the Middle Ages proper. In the first place, we have always been taught to approach it from a strictly national standpoint. And though it is easy enough to study the England of the Tudors or the France of Louis XIV from this national angle, this makes it all the more difficult to study Europe as a whole. For then, as always, the typical European movements crossed the national frontiers and set up complex international relations which changed the national part as well as the European whole. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the Catholic Revival, the Enlightenment were all international movements, though each of them owed much to the leadership of some particular people. For while it is natural and right that we should study political history in terms of states or political units, it is also right that we should study civilization in terms of cultures. In spite of the doubts of the positivist, a culture is just as much a sociological reality as a state. Indeed it is more real inasmuch as it has a larger social content. For it is at once a common way of life based on a common social tradition and also a spiritual community based on common beliefs and ideas. But while this conception of culture has become fundamental in the work of the modern anthropologist and prehistorian , it is still comparatively unfamiliar to the historian of modern Europe. And it is mainly on this account that the period of which I am speaking is so difficult to study, since, in spite of the immense wealth and variety of historical literature, there is a remarkable lack of standard works on European culture as a whole, especially during the seventeenth century when the Baroque culture of Catholic Europe transcended national and political frontiers as the culture of medieval Christendom had done. This is particularly unfortunate because the age of which I am speaking began with two great international movements—the Renais- Renaissance and Reformation 23 sance and the Reformation—which had a profound effect on European culture and which cannot be...