What do you think?
Rate this book
The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society
In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation" and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism—all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West.
Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation's protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge.
The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.
Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation's protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge.
The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.
539 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2012
About the author
Brad S. Gregory
15 books61 followersBrad S. Gregory is Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Notre Dame. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University (1996) and was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows (1994-96). Before joining the faculty at Notre Dame in 2003, Gregory taught at Stanford University, where he received early tenure in 2001. Gregory has two degrees in philosophy as well, both earned at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. He has received multiple teaching awards at Stanford and Notre Dame, and in 2005 was named the inaugural winner of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture as the outstanding mid-career humanities scholar in the United States. Gregory's research focuses on Christianity in the Reformation era, the long-term effects of the Reformation, secularization in early modern and modern Western history, and methodology in the study of religion.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 56 reviews
October 4, 2023
I was invited to a reading group at Baylor that was going through this book. Great parts included Gregory's insistence that theism does not preclude scientific endeavors; in fact, atheism precludes authoritative interpretation/application of scientific data. The really bad parts are where Gregory decides that the Reformation's "sola Scriptura" necessarily led to hyper-pluralism—once the absolute adherence to Roman Catholic tradition was jettisoned, private interpretation was supposed to lead people to agreement on the truth (the Bible's perspicuity). But that didn't happen, and Gregory blames the Reformation. Gregory acts as a patronizing Christ figure who asks God to forgive Martin Luther, who knew not what he was doing.
Instead of giving my own reply, besides saying that Gregory's nostalgia (which he claims to be against) makes him pretend that pre-Reformation Catholicism was monolithic, I'll let Carl Trueman do it for me: Part 1 and Part 2.
This book "is a strong work of advocacy that ends with a prayer," just like MacIntyre's After Virtue, which seems to have inspired Gregory's book. "A straightforward history of the post–Reformation West written from an explicitly Catholic standpoint would have been a welcome addition to our understanding of the period and of ourselves. Instead, Gregory has offered up a sly crypto-Catholic travel brochure for The Road Not Taken."
See a summary of Mark Noll's comments here (includes a link to an hour-long video).
Here's a positive review from a Catholic archbishop.
Alan Jacobs has some helpful comments (and connections to Charles Taylor's A Secular Age) here.
Here's a later review (because the paperback version came out toward the end of 2015) by Michael Horton: "This isn't a book about the history of the Reformation and its effects on events in modernity, but a tract consisting of six essays on how the Reformation destroyed the West." Horton asks, if we're all concerned about unintended consequences, "Was the Reformation the unintended consequence of a corrupt medieval church?"
Rebel in the Ranks is B.S. Gregory's popularized version, published with calculation in 2017. Carl Trueman reviews it at TGC, and Brad Littlejohn reviews it in CT; Brad's review links to Jordan Ballor's review in Calvin Theological Journal and Benjamin Kaplan's article in Journal of World History.
Instead of giving my own reply, besides saying that Gregory's nostalgia (which he claims to be against) makes him pretend that pre-Reformation Catholicism was monolithic, I'll let Carl Trueman do it for me: Part 1 and Part 2.
This book "is a strong work of advocacy that ends with a prayer," just like MacIntyre's After Virtue, which seems to have inspired Gregory's book. "A straightforward history of the post–Reformation West written from an explicitly Catholic standpoint would have been a welcome addition to our understanding of the period and of ourselves. Instead, Gregory has offered up a sly crypto-Catholic travel brochure for The Road Not Taken."
See a summary of Mark Noll's comments here (includes a link to an hour-long video).
Here's a positive review from a Catholic archbishop.
Alan Jacobs has some helpful comments (and connections to Charles Taylor's A Secular Age) here.
Here's a later review (because the paperback version came out toward the end of 2015) by Michael Horton: "This isn't a book about the history of the Reformation and its effects on events in modernity, but a tract consisting of six essays on how the Reformation destroyed the West." Horton asks, if we're all concerned about unintended consequences, "Was the Reformation the unintended consequence of a corrupt medieval church?"
Rebel in the Ranks is B.S. Gregory's popularized version, published with calculation in 2017. Carl Trueman reviews it at TGC, and Brad Littlejohn reviews it in CT; Brad's review links to Jordan Ballor's review in Calvin Theological Journal and Benjamin Kaplan's article in Journal of World History.
Read
May 20, 2023تدوينة تتناول الكتاب في ترجمته العربية:
https://aalwhebey.com/2023/05/20/%d8%...
https://aalwhebey.com/2023/05/20/%d8%...
June 8, 2018
Exhaustively documented, and in some ways just exhausting, though at the same time exhilarating, Brad Gregory’s "The Unintended Reformation" is a towering achievement. It synthesizes centuries of history and multiple avenues of thought to analyze how we arrived at certain negative aspects of modernity. Gregory’s claim is that we got here as the result of the unintended consequences of choices made in response to “major, perceived human problems.” Those choices were, initially, the Reformation’s religious choices, which ran counter to the entire worldview of medieval Christianity. But the Reformation did not solve the problems—it made them worse, in a declining spiral, accelerated and exacerbated by subsequent secularization, itself partially the result of the Reformation. The result is a world in which the ability of humans to find meaning in their lives has been crippled, rather than enhanced. We would, implicitly, be better off with something more like the High Medieval synthesis destroyed by Martin Luther.
This is a reactionary book, of course, even if that is not the author’s intent. Any book that, in effect, revolves around the idea that the medieval European tag team of church and state, each in its own sphere, together produced a better society than the one we have today, a superior “institutionalized worldview,” is necessarily reactionary. Étienne Gilson sighs contentedly in his grave; Jacques Maritain smiles; Carl Schmitt chuckles grimly. Of course, reaction as a political program, as I have said before, is not a return to some past Golden Age, or, more drily phrased, to the status quo ante. Such a definition is meant to be both pejorative and to absolve progressives of any need to respond to reactionary thought. Rather, reactionary political thought is any thought directed at what should be done now, if and to the extent such thought relies or is based on reference to the past as a positive guide.
The most critical element of reactionary thought is, therefore, that it does not regard the past as superseded. All supersessionist narratives are automatically rejected as incoherent. There is no arc of history; it has no right side. History embodies good and evil, justice and injustice, truth and falsehood, and the task of the political thinker of the Now is to take these strands and make of them a world in which fallen human beings can flourish. Much of this book is an explicit rejection of “supersessionist history,” the Whig or progressive idea that the world today is the way it is because that is the way it was destined to be. The past is not even past, and human life is, contra writers like Steven Pinker and Jonah Goldberg, not explained and justified by the Enlightenment. It is explained by the choices we have made; some of those choices were bad, and they should be unspooled, if possible, and new, better choices made.
In fact, I hold that a necessary element of a reactionary political program is viewing the world with, if not new eyes, from fresh perspectives, those lacking today as the sun sets on the Enlightenment experiment. More and more, I think of Enlightenment thought as the picture of Dorian Gray, whose flaws were concealed until they weren’t. Or, perhaps, the Enlightenment is one of those rockets under which the fire flares, and it majestically rises from its launchpad, a study in power and might—but something is wrong; it hesitates; it halts; it falls backward, downward to destruction. Reaction by definition finds the present wanting, and the present projected forward even more wanting, which is a view that necessarily conflicts with the unexamined common assumptions of our time. Thus, Gregory’s book is, if Reaction is radical, a very radical work, though it doesn’t feel like it while you’re reading it, and Gregory might disagree.
That’s a lot of talk about myself in a review of someone else’s book. I offer those initial thoughts because I am now formally turning to my study of Reaction, in preparation for completing and offering my own book-length thoughts on Reaction as a viable political program. I have already begun this project, in a stop-start manner, with analysis of Mark Lilla’s book on reactionary thought, "The Shipwrecked Mind," as well as in some other reviews, in particular of Adrian Goldsworthy’s "Augustus" and Victor Sebestyen’s "Lenin." In my turn to reading on Reaction, I intend to focus not on formally reactionary pamphlets or roadmaps (although those, and much else, will appear), but on a wide variety of books that shed light at an angle, as it were, on political philosophy as it exists in the early twenty-first-century West. We will spend much time traveling back in time, and maybe a little traveling forward in time (I do like science fiction, after all). As with all my reviews, though, I’m doing this for me, not for you. I intend this to be the homework for, and assist me in writing, my very own work of political thought, which I plan to be an actual roadmap for political Reaction—for, after all, it is easy to analyze, and easier to criticize, but hard to create a positive and coherent program.
So, to Brad Gregory’s book. This book took me forever to read. It is only four hundred pages, but it has two hundred more pages of footnotes, most of which I studied and pondered, and for a non-trivial amount of which I examined the works to which Gregory refers, something Amazon and an unlimited budget for buying books permits. But such depth does not mean the book is bad; it is quite good, and it has gotten a lot of attention, though probably more attention than actual readers, I suspect. It is now five hundred years since the Reformation, and Gregory does not think it was a good five hundred years. The Reformation ruined the medieval institutional synthesis, which, while far from perfect, had many virtues missing today. And the Reformation necessarily and directly led to the worst aspects of modernity, mediated by the aggressive secularism of the Enlightenment. First, to atomization and polarization. Second, to unbridled consumerism, to the “goods culture” (as opposed to the “culture of the good”), with no “acquisitive ceiling” and with the loss of the concept of excess, which leads to spiritual anomie and other harms such as environmental catastrophe (including climate change). Third, and perhaps most importantly, if most abstractly, to an inability to reconcile competing “truth claims,” and in fact the rejection of the entire category of truth, leading to “hyperpluralism,” excessive emancipation and, implicitly, to the near destruction of the entire Christian project, although Gregory does not directly predict that outcome.
Explaining an entire culture and its changes over five hundred years is no small task. Gregory therefore breaks his analysis into six separate narratives, while cautioning that they are not, and cannot be, separate in real life, and are to act in conjunction in his book. “As a whole the book thus constitutes an explanation about the makings of modernity as both a multifaceted rejection and a variegated appropriation of different elements of medieval Christianity. . . . The six strands in the analysis focus respectively on the relationship among religion, science, and metaphysics; the basis for truth claims related to human values and meaning; the institutional locus of the public exercise of power; moral discourse and moral behavior; human desires and capitalism; and the relationship between higher education and assumptions about knowledge.” You begin to see what I mean by saying this book is exhausting.
Gregory’s first thread, on “religion, science, and metaphysics,” revolves around a common complaint of modern conservative thinkers, that late medieval Schoolmen, most notably William of Ockham, endorsed nominalism and thereby laid the groundwork for modern relativism and secularism. But this is secondary to Gregory’s main focus, on thought preceding but tied to nominalism, centering on “univocity.” This is the change from holding, with Aquinas, that God has nothing in common with humans, but can only be understood in His characteristics by analogy, to holding that God shares with us the characteristic of “being” or “existence,” even if in a qualitatively different way than humans. (By chance I am also currently reading David Bentley Hart’s outstanding "The Experience of God," which extensively covers the same topic.) In Gregory’s reading, this change, led by John Duns Scotus, leads to the effective lowering of God, whom it becomes easy to view as one being among others, even if superior in every way. God becomes a mere demiurge, or at most the God of Deism, not the transcendental ground of all reality.
The basis for this move to univocity was that otherwise it was deemed impossible to reason about God, a desired end of the Scholastics. Analogy was held to be an unsatisfactory method of analysis, although until that date it was the universal method in Christianity. What the Schoolmen did not see was that if univocity is true, yet no direct evidence for God is seen in the natural world, it becomes easy to exclude God when reasoning about any topic at all, since the logical conclusion under univocity is that He does not exist, or if He does, it is impossible to prove. Science and faith thus began to be seen as logical opposites, though that is certainly not what the original proponents of univocity intended, nor is it a rational stance. The Reformation exacerbated this problem, with many reformers, especially in the Zwinglian dispensations, rejecting sacramentality, with such rejection being fundamentally a univocal approach, a disenchantment of God’s role in the universe. And as the Scientific Revolution proceeded (driven by other aspects of European Christianity, but that is another story), and Ockham’s Razor used as the basis for approaching theories of the natural world, it became modish, therefore, to hold that God was disproven, or logically unproven, or at least unnecessary to reckon with.
Under the traditional understanding of God’s nature, nothing could be farther from the truth. And in the new analysis, God was not in fact disproven, nor were any of the traditional and highly sophisticated analyses of His nature undercut—rather, a category error swallowed the whole analysis. But increasingly, and to this day, proponents of naturalistic philosophy acted as if God were disproven and traditional analyses obviated—in which acting they were helped by the intellectual weakness of their Christian opponents, increasingly fragmented and untutored in the realization that they had themselves absorbed univocal premises. But given that this is how intellectual fashion developed, the effect was to exclude God from an ever-widening philosophical sphere. Moreover, the fragmentation of Christian thought and unity produced by the Reformation further eroded any possible influence of Christian belief, since there were so many competing, and inherently incompatible, views on critical matters. Easier to ignore and dismiss them all.
Gregory’s main point is that ��truth claims” are different if the claimant believes in God (really believes, not pseudo-believes, like followers of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism). If God has no relevance, moreover, emancipation can plausibly become a more elevated goal. And, importantly, religion becomes mere, and burdened by, sentiment—hence, feelings and emotivism, which, in a feedback loop, leads to the conclusion that science and faith are opposites. Moreover, the disenchantment of the world leads to its instrumental use; the road leads directly from Francis Bacon to mountaintop removal, the Great Pacific garbage patch, and global warming.
Gregory’s second thread, which therefore follows from the conclusion of the first, “the basis for truth claims related to human values and meaning,” is really the hinge of the entire book. If such truth claims didn’t matter, there would be no point in decrying the inability to find a coherent basis for them. The point here is simple, though fleshed out in detail. It is that truth claims matter, and that the Reformation, a justified, or at least understandable, response to the massive moral failings of fifteenth-century Christians, instead of making the basis for those truth claims more robust, destroyed it by making every man his own priest. Truth claims are, in essence, “Life Questions”—what should we believe, and why? What is meaningful in life? How should I lead life? Until the modern era, religion, Christianity in the West, uniformly provided the answers, or at least the starting points and midpoints for answers, to such questions. Not that the answers were entirely uniform before the Reformation—not only personal idiosyncrasy, but the wide range of diverse answers within Christendom made that untrue. “The late medieval church was a large playground, but one enclosed by forbidding fences. . . .” The Reformation principle of sola scriptura was meant to hack off the supposed encrustations of the Roman Church, not to allow every person to form his own opinion about all matters of doctrine, but once the principle was admitted, there was, and never could be, any logical stopping point. Thus, the Reformation produced an exponential growth in competing truth claims, made worse when biblical interpretation was joined by claims of interpretation guided by the Holy Spirit, as those made by Quakers. The end result, after centuries, is incoherence and religion as Philip Rieff’s “therapeutic culture,” religion as a vague feeling of being good and feeling good, since there is no firm ground—what Gregory repeatedly calls “the Kingdom of Whatever.” The trend toward this end, combined with the Wars of Religion, supported the Pyrrhonian skepticism that emerged at the beginning of the Enlightenment, and Gregory covers Descartes, Hume, Montaigne, and many others in this light. His point, though, is not to endorse them, but to note that all of these, and many other more modern philosophers, are equally unable to agree on answers to the Life Questions, so incoherence is not a function of religion; it is equally applicable to analysis sola ratio. Whose fault? The Reformation’s.
Gregory’s third element in his conjunction is “the institutional locus of the public exercise of power.” From the perspective of secular rulers, ever more fractalization of truth claims was intolerable (especially after the Peasants’ War), so they chose winners and enforced their claims in each ruler’s domain. As a result, we tend to perceive a less wide range of doctrine in Protestantism than actually existed, since the “magisterial” churches (basically Lutheranism and Calvinism) became important due to their adoption and enforcement by the state, and the “radical” churches became fragmented and of much less public importance, except in a few notable or dramatic instances, such as the Anabaptists in Münster. Even today, the result is that “our respective sovereign states dictate what individuals and institutions can and cannot do in exercising religious faith” (a tension we saw this week in the Supreme Court’s Masterpiece Cakeshop decision).
To get to discussing this post-Reformation problem, Gregory reviews the tangled Western history of church and state, both in its historical highlights and in the practical effects, including the regular failures of the church, and Christians, to live up to Christ’s commands. The effect of the post-Reformation increase in state power over the role of churches has been that “churches in general would [now] exert only as much public power and authority as they were permitted,” which used to be a lot, but which, “in the early twenty-first century, when sovereign states rule together with the market, it is almost none.” Again, to Gregory, this is a bug, not a feature. Concurrently, state power itself rose, and religion became a prime driver of war, ultimately resulting in the not-illogical conclusion, beginning with the Dutch, that we would all be better off with fewer religious disputes. Gregory reviews, among others, Locke, Jefferson, and Tocqueville, noting that where we have ended up is with the dominance of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, which is not really Christianity at all, and that end was, in retrospect, inevitable. As Gregory points out, a human community of not-wholly autonomous individuals is the necessary bedrock of both the Christian life and of any healthy society, in its living, in its transmission, and in its recognition and practice of virtue. Instead, what we have is Charles Taylor’s “secular age.” Gregory focuses on the role of the state, in particular the American judiciary, in the dissolution of truth claims, but does not focus on the increasing use of the state to repress orthodox Christian belief, though the latter is also a necessary consequence of the former. In any case, the system we have ended up with “also meant the separation of politics from morality—or rather, a transition from a Christian ethics of the good to a secular ethics of rights in combination with a distinction between public and private spheres in conjunction with the privatization of religion.”
It is the consequences of that separation that are the topic of Gregory’s fourth thread, “moral discourse and moral behavior”—more precisely, the subjectivizing of it. Here, Alisdair MacIntyre, a man whose revival has come, if it ever really left, is front and center. MacIntyre’s project (his book, "After Virtue," is on my Reaction reading list, of course, for the bedrock of his claims is the rejection of supersessionism) was the revival of Aristotelean concepts of virtue, a sally against Enlightenment rejection of the same and with an inescapable logical end in Christianity. MacIntyre sought to restore the teleology of Man (a concept that ninety-nine out of a hundred people today, chosen already for the rare characteristic of knowing what “teleology” means, would reject as equivalent to believing in mermaids—nice to imagine, silly to believe in). By this means, relativism would be dispelled, emotivism rejected as the basis for answering Life Questions, and rational moral discourse restored. Up with the common good, down with John Stuart Mill.
[Review continues as first comment.]
This is a reactionary book, of course, even if that is not the author’s intent. Any book that, in effect, revolves around the idea that the medieval European tag team of church and state, each in its own sphere, together produced a better society than the one we have today, a superior “institutionalized worldview,” is necessarily reactionary. Étienne Gilson sighs contentedly in his grave; Jacques Maritain smiles; Carl Schmitt chuckles grimly. Of course, reaction as a political program, as I have said before, is not a return to some past Golden Age, or, more drily phrased, to the status quo ante. Such a definition is meant to be both pejorative and to absolve progressives of any need to respond to reactionary thought. Rather, reactionary political thought is any thought directed at what should be done now, if and to the extent such thought relies or is based on reference to the past as a positive guide.
The most critical element of reactionary thought is, therefore, that it does not regard the past as superseded. All supersessionist narratives are automatically rejected as incoherent. There is no arc of history; it has no right side. History embodies good and evil, justice and injustice, truth and falsehood, and the task of the political thinker of the Now is to take these strands and make of them a world in which fallen human beings can flourish. Much of this book is an explicit rejection of “supersessionist history,” the Whig or progressive idea that the world today is the way it is because that is the way it was destined to be. The past is not even past, and human life is, contra writers like Steven Pinker and Jonah Goldberg, not explained and justified by the Enlightenment. It is explained by the choices we have made; some of those choices were bad, and they should be unspooled, if possible, and new, better choices made.
In fact, I hold that a necessary element of a reactionary political program is viewing the world with, if not new eyes, from fresh perspectives, those lacking today as the sun sets on the Enlightenment experiment. More and more, I think of Enlightenment thought as the picture of Dorian Gray, whose flaws were concealed until they weren’t. Or, perhaps, the Enlightenment is one of those rockets under which the fire flares, and it majestically rises from its launchpad, a study in power and might—but something is wrong; it hesitates; it halts; it falls backward, downward to destruction. Reaction by definition finds the present wanting, and the present projected forward even more wanting, which is a view that necessarily conflicts with the unexamined common assumptions of our time. Thus, Gregory’s book is, if Reaction is radical, a very radical work, though it doesn’t feel like it while you’re reading it, and Gregory might disagree.
That’s a lot of talk about myself in a review of someone else’s book. I offer those initial thoughts because I am now formally turning to my study of Reaction, in preparation for completing and offering my own book-length thoughts on Reaction as a viable political program. I have already begun this project, in a stop-start manner, with analysis of Mark Lilla’s book on reactionary thought, "The Shipwrecked Mind," as well as in some other reviews, in particular of Adrian Goldsworthy’s "Augustus" and Victor Sebestyen’s "Lenin." In my turn to reading on Reaction, I intend to focus not on formally reactionary pamphlets or roadmaps (although those, and much else, will appear), but on a wide variety of books that shed light at an angle, as it were, on political philosophy as it exists in the early twenty-first-century West. We will spend much time traveling back in time, and maybe a little traveling forward in time (I do like science fiction, after all). As with all my reviews, though, I’m doing this for me, not for you. I intend this to be the homework for, and assist me in writing, my very own work of political thought, which I plan to be an actual roadmap for political Reaction—for, after all, it is easy to analyze, and easier to criticize, but hard to create a positive and coherent program.
So, to Brad Gregory’s book. This book took me forever to read. It is only four hundred pages, but it has two hundred more pages of footnotes, most of which I studied and pondered, and for a non-trivial amount of which I examined the works to which Gregory refers, something Amazon and an unlimited budget for buying books permits. But such depth does not mean the book is bad; it is quite good, and it has gotten a lot of attention, though probably more attention than actual readers, I suspect. It is now five hundred years since the Reformation, and Gregory does not think it was a good five hundred years. The Reformation ruined the medieval institutional synthesis, which, while far from perfect, had many virtues missing today. And the Reformation necessarily and directly led to the worst aspects of modernity, mediated by the aggressive secularism of the Enlightenment. First, to atomization and polarization. Second, to unbridled consumerism, to the “goods culture” (as opposed to the “culture of the good”), with no “acquisitive ceiling” and with the loss of the concept of excess, which leads to spiritual anomie and other harms such as environmental catastrophe (including climate change). Third, and perhaps most importantly, if most abstractly, to an inability to reconcile competing “truth claims,” and in fact the rejection of the entire category of truth, leading to “hyperpluralism,” excessive emancipation and, implicitly, to the near destruction of the entire Christian project, although Gregory does not directly predict that outcome.
Explaining an entire culture and its changes over five hundred years is no small task. Gregory therefore breaks his analysis into six separate narratives, while cautioning that they are not, and cannot be, separate in real life, and are to act in conjunction in his book. “As a whole the book thus constitutes an explanation about the makings of modernity as both a multifaceted rejection and a variegated appropriation of different elements of medieval Christianity. . . . The six strands in the analysis focus respectively on the relationship among religion, science, and metaphysics; the basis for truth claims related to human values and meaning; the institutional locus of the public exercise of power; moral discourse and moral behavior; human desires and capitalism; and the relationship between higher education and assumptions about knowledge.” You begin to see what I mean by saying this book is exhausting.
Gregory’s first thread, on “religion, science, and metaphysics,” revolves around a common complaint of modern conservative thinkers, that late medieval Schoolmen, most notably William of Ockham, endorsed nominalism and thereby laid the groundwork for modern relativism and secularism. But this is secondary to Gregory’s main focus, on thought preceding but tied to nominalism, centering on “univocity.” This is the change from holding, with Aquinas, that God has nothing in common with humans, but can only be understood in His characteristics by analogy, to holding that God shares with us the characteristic of “being” or “existence,” even if in a qualitatively different way than humans. (By chance I am also currently reading David Bentley Hart’s outstanding "The Experience of God," which extensively covers the same topic.) In Gregory’s reading, this change, led by John Duns Scotus, leads to the effective lowering of God, whom it becomes easy to view as one being among others, even if superior in every way. God becomes a mere demiurge, or at most the God of Deism, not the transcendental ground of all reality.
The basis for this move to univocity was that otherwise it was deemed impossible to reason about God, a desired end of the Scholastics. Analogy was held to be an unsatisfactory method of analysis, although until that date it was the universal method in Christianity. What the Schoolmen did not see was that if univocity is true, yet no direct evidence for God is seen in the natural world, it becomes easy to exclude God when reasoning about any topic at all, since the logical conclusion under univocity is that He does not exist, or if He does, it is impossible to prove. Science and faith thus began to be seen as logical opposites, though that is certainly not what the original proponents of univocity intended, nor is it a rational stance. The Reformation exacerbated this problem, with many reformers, especially in the Zwinglian dispensations, rejecting sacramentality, with such rejection being fundamentally a univocal approach, a disenchantment of God’s role in the universe. And as the Scientific Revolution proceeded (driven by other aspects of European Christianity, but that is another story), and Ockham’s Razor used as the basis for approaching theories of the natural world, it became modish, therefore, to hold that God was disproven, or logically unproven, or at least unnecessary to reckon with.
Under the traditional understanding of God’s nature, nothing could be farther from the truth. And in the new analysis, God was not in fact disproven, nor were any of the traditional and highly sophisticated analyses of His nature undercut—rather, a category error swallowed the whole analysis. But increasingly, and to this day, proponents of naturalistic philosophy acted as if God were disproven and traditional analyses obviated—in which acting they were helped by the intellectual weakness of their Christian opponents, increasingly fragmented and untutored in the realization that they had themselves absorbed univocal premises. But given that this is how intellectual fashion developed, the effect was to exclude God from an ever-widening philosophical sphere. Moreover, the fragmentation of Christian thought and unity produced by the Reformation further eroded any possible influence of Christian belief, since there were so many competing, and inherently incompatible, views on critical matters. Easier to ignore and dismiss them all.
Gregory’s main point is that ��truth claims” are different if the claimant believes in God (really believes, not pseudo-believes, like followers of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism). If God has no relevance, moreover, emancipation can plausibly become a more elevated goal. And, importantly, religion becomes mere, and burdened by, sentiment—hence, feelings and emotivism, which, in a feedback loop, leads to the conclusion that science and faith are opposites. Moreover, the disenchantment of the world leads to its instrumental use; the road leads directly from Francis Bacon to mountaintop removal, the Great Pacific garbage patch, and global warming.
Gregory’s second thread, which therefore follows from the conclusion of the first, “the basis for truth claims related to human values and meaning,” is really the hinge of the entire book. If such truth claims didn’t matter, there would be no point in decrying the inability to find a coherent basis for them. The point here is simple, though fleshed out in detail. It is that truth claims matter, and that the Reformation, a justified, or at least understandable, response to the massive moral failings of fifteenth-century Christians, instead of making the basis for those truth claims more robust, destroyed it by making every man his own priest. Truth claims are, in essence, “Life Questions”—what should we believe, and why? What is meaningful in life? How should I lead life? Until the modern era, religion, Christianity in the West, uniformly provided the answers, or at least the starting points and midpoints for answers, to such questions. Not that the answers were entirely uniform before the Reformation—not only personal idiosyncrasy, but the wide range of diverse answers within Christendom made that untrue. “The late medieval church was a large playground, but one enclosed by forbidding fences. . . .” The Reformation principle of sola scriptura was meant to hack off the supposed encrustations of the Roman Church, not to allow every person to form his own opinion about all matters of doctrine, but once the principle was admitted, there was, and never could be, any logical stopping point. Thus, the Reformation produced an exponential growth in competing truth claims, made worse when biblical interpretation was joined by claims of interpretation guided by the Holy Spirit, as those made by Quakers. The end result, after centuries, is incoherence and religion as Philip Rieff’s “therapeutic culture,” religion as a vague feeling of being good and feeling good, since there is no firm ground—what Gregory repeatedly calls “the Kingdom of Whatever.” The trend toward this end, combined with the Wars of Religion, supported the Pyrrhonian skepticism that emerged at the beginning of the Enlightenment, and Gregory covers Descartes, Hume, Montaigne, and many others in this light. His point, though, is not to endorse them, but to note that all of these, and many other more modern philosophers, are equally unable to agree on answers to the Life Questions, so incoherence is not a function of religion; it is equally applicable to analysis sola ratio. Whose fault? The Reformation’s.
Gregory’s third element in his conjunction is “the institutional locus of the public exercise of power.” From the perspective of secular rulers, ever more fractalization of truth claims was intolerable (especially after the Peasants’ War), so they chose winners and enforced their claims in each ruler’s domain. As a result, we tend to perceive a less wide range of doctrine in Protestantism than actually existed, since the “magisterial” churches (basically Lutheranism and Calvinism) became important due to their adoption and enforcement by the state, and the “radical” churches became fragmented and of much less public importance, except in a few notable or dramatic instances, such as the Anabaptists in Münster. Even today, the result is that “our respective sovereign states dictate what individuals and institutions can and cannot do in exercising religious faith” (a tension we saw this week in the Supreme Court’s Masterpiece Cakeshop decision).
To get to discussing this post-Reformation problem, Gregory reviews the tangled Western history of church and state, both in its historical highlights and in the practical effects, including the regular failures of the church, and Christians, to live up to Christ’s commands. The effect of the post-Reformation increase in state power over the role of churches has been that “churches in general would [now] exert only as much public power and authority as they were permitted,” which used to be a lot, but which, “in the early twenty-first century, when sovereign states rule together with the market, it is almost none.” Again, to Gregory, this is a bug, not a feature. Concurrently, state power itself rose, and religion became a prime driver of war, ultimately resulting in the not-illogical conclusion, beginning with the Dutch, that we would all be better off with fewer religious disputes. Gregory reviews, among others, Locke, Jefferson, and Tocqueville, noting that where we have ended up is with the dominance of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, which is not really Christianity at all, and that end was, in retrospect, inevitable. As Gregory points out, a human community of not-wholly autonomous individuals is the necessary bedrock of both the Christian life and of any healthy society, in its living, in its transmission, and in its recognition and practice of virtue. Instead, what we have is Charles Taylor’s “secular age.” Gregory focuses on the role of the state, in particular the American judiciary, in the dissolution of truth claims, but does not focus on the increasing use of the state to repress orthodox Christian belief, though the latter is also a necessary consequence of the former. In any case, the system we have ended up with “also meant the separation of politics from morality—or rather, a transition from a Christian ethics of the good to a secular ethics of rights in combination with a distinction between public and private spheres in conjunction with the privatization of religion.”
It is the consequences of that separation that are the topic of Gregory’s fourth thread, “moral discourse and moral behavior”—more precisely, the subjectivizing of it. Here, Alisdair MacIntyre, a man whose revival has come, if it ever really left, is front and center. MacIntyre’s project (his book, "After Virtue," is on my Reaction reading list, of course, for the bedrock of his claims is the rejection of supersessionism) was the revival of Aristotelean concepts of virtue, a sally against Enlightenment rejection of the same and with an inescapable logical end in Christianity. MacIntyre sought to restore the teleology of Man (a concept that ninety-nine out of a hundred people today, chosen already for the rare characteristic of knowing what “teleology” means, would reject as equivalent to believing in mermaids—nice to imagine, silly to believe in). By this means, relativism would be dispelled, emotivism rejected as the basis for answering Life Questions, and rational moral discourse restored. Up with the common good, down with John Stuart Mill.
[Review continues as first comment.]
January 31, 2019
9.9/10.
Almost perfect except for liberal libarbitrist nonsense scattered throughout, exemplified at kindle locs 7399-7401. This is the most exciting piece of social and intellectual historiography I've ever read regarding this time period. This collection of six many-disciplinary essays is mandatory reading for anyone who is interested in Christianity, the Reformation, secularization, the modern university, the consumerist culture of late capitalism (termed by the author 'the goods life'), the hyperspecialization of knowledge, the deleterious effects of Scotism and univocal metaphysics, and (the secularization of) academia.
I almost awarded this book my eighth perfect 'seven out of five stars' nonfiction rating alongside such books as Rushton's REB, Jaynes's 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind', The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Salter's 'On Genetic Interests', the CoC of MacDonald, and the ST of Aquinas. These works, like this, share in common one thing: they are necessary for intelligently and insightfully understanding, analyzing, and engaging with the worlds - exterior and interior, trascendent and immanent - which we, as human beings, inhabit.
Almost perfect except for liberal libarbitrist nonsense scattered throughout, exemplified at kindle locs 7399-7401. This is the most exciting piece of social and intellectual historiography I've ever read regarding this time period. This collection of six many-disciplinary essays is mandatory reading for anyone who is interested in Christianity, the Reformation, secularization, the modern university, the consumerist culture of late capitalism (termed by the author 'the goods life'), the hyperspecialization of knowledge, the deleterious effects of Scotism and univocal metaphysics, and (the secularization of) academia.
I almost awarded this book my eighth perfect 'seven out of five stars' nonfiction rating alongside such books as Rushton's REB, Jaynes's 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind', The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Salter's 'On Genetic Interests', the CoC of MacDonald, and the ST of Aquinas. These works, like this, share in common one thing: they are necessary for intelligently and insightfully understanding, analyzing, and engaging with the worlds - exterior and interior, trascendent and immanent - which we, as human beings, inhabit.
May 5, 2017
I don't know that I ever read a book where I liked parts of it as much as any book I've ever read while other parts made me frustrated and angry. Gregory's book is a work of history, tracing how the late medieval world transitioned into the world we have today. In this he is covering similar ground to Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. In fact, that book and this one are must-reads to understand our world.
Gregory sees that the common understanding is one of supersecession. In this, there is a tremendous gap between the world of 1500 and the modern world of today and the two have nothing to do with one another. Thus, the medieval world, and the Reformation, have nothing to say about what's going on today. Gregory argues that in reality, the roots of our fragmented culture are found in what happened in the late medieval and Reformation world.
Perhaps you need to go back even further. The first chapter is a discussion of how theologians have spoken of God. Aquinas, following traditional Christian thought, spoke of God analogically. In essence, this means that our speaking of God is always partial. God is not a being among other beings, God is a separate Being in his own separate category. But starting with Scotus, and then Ockham and others later, univocal language of God took over. Scotus argued that we can speak of God because we are beings like God and thus words mean the same when applied to us and God. This plays out in many ways, but most important for this book is that it makes God smaller. God begins to be seen as something that can be understood. Coupled with Ockham's razor and over time it is thought that if there is a natural explanation for something, then God is superfluous. And since God is just a bigger version of us and we can' find evidence for God, then God is not needed.
As a sidenote, coming to understand God in the way Aquinas spoke has been very helpful for me. I think of David Bentley Hart's book The Experience of God as a good explanation for how God is Being outside of nature. What this means is there is nothing science can discover that would challenge God as God is wholly other than science.
So yeah, there's a lot I found fantastic about Gregory's book. One part I struggled with was his blaming of the Reformation for much that went wrong in modernity. For example, The Reformation got rid of papal authority and replaced it with sola scriptura. Gregory shows that the promise that Christians could unite on the Bible failed, as no one could agree on the Bible. This division then led to removing the Bible in place of reason, though of course reason also has not brought unity in ethics. The other parts of the story take the same route - once the regulation of the late medieval Catholic church was removed, the cat was out of the bag and running into modernism and secularism.
I don't think Gregory is wrong on the connection between the Reformation and modern philosophy and secularism. Further, I am wrong, probably, in using the word "blaming" above. But at times Gregory does come off a bit simplistic, as if avoiding the Reformation would have kept everything hunky-dory. He fairly points out the issues in the Catholic church, how many leaders did not live up to their own standards. Yet this is the problem. He says in the past the Catholic church was able to handle self-critique and change. When Luther attacked indulgences, there was no interest in hearing his case. And the indulgences were really ruining people in Germany. If the Reformation opened up some problems, the resistant-t0-change Catholic church needs its share of blame too.
It was also interesting that the invention of the printing press was barely mentioned. One reason the Reformation took hold was because more people could read and pamphlets could be printed more quickly. Historical counter-factuals are always iffy, but if the Reformation had not happened in the 1500s, something would have happened. With printing presses more people would read more and think more and be critical of the institutions over them. Our secular world might look different, but I doubt Christendom would be around in the 2000s.
Finally, Gregory does really well in pointing out what was wrong with the Reformation and late-medieval Catholicism. But he does not offer much in terms of solution. The conclusion does give some ideas. As I read, I honestly at times thought his solution would be for everyone to unite under the pope. I guess he knows that's not about to happen. His idea for a way forward is for academics to be more open to explanations outside their accepted naturalistic worldview. I fully agree, though I won't hold my breath. It makes me think of Jacques Ellul's Technological Society where he flat out says there is no solution to what he is about to explain. I kind of wish Gregory had said that. Or even offered some ideas for how to live in this secular age.
I mean, most of us are not academics. But we have to wrestle with how to live as faithful people in a capitalist consumerist society. What would Christian unity look like when the old divisions of the 1500s-1800s seem outdated (Reformed/Lutheran vs. Catholic) and new divisions (liberal/progressive vs. evangelical) are apparent. Even for many non-Catholics, the Pope is still a sort of leader we all admire. How does the growth of faith in the global south and around the world relate? Western Christianity may have been unified, but Greek Orthodox would always say they were the true church so Christianity was not unified even in medieval era.
All in all, this was a fantastic book. I guess wrestling with how to live as a disciple today, knowing the truth of the stories Gregory has shared, is up to the readers.
Gregory sees that the common understanding is one of supersecession. In this, there is a tremendous gap between the world of 1500 and the modern world of today and the two have nothing to do with one another. Thus, the medieval world, and the Reformation, have nothing to say about what's going on today. Gregory argues that in reality, the roots of our fragmented culture are found in what happened in the late medieval and Reformation world.
Perhaps you need to go back even further. The first chapter is a discussion of how theologians have spoken of God. Aquinas, following traditional Christian thought, spoke of God analogically. In essence, this means that our speaking of God is always partial. God is not a being among other beings, God is a separate Being in his own separate category. But starting with Scotus, and then Ockham and others later, univocal language of God took over. Scotus argued that we can speak of God because we are beings like God and thus words mean the same when applied to us and God. This plays out in many ways, but most important for this book is that it makes God smaller. God begins to be seen as something that can be understood. Coupled with Ockham's razor and over time it is thought that if there is a natural explanation for something, then God is superfluous. And since God is just a bigger version of us and we can' find evidence for God, then God is not needed.
As a sidenote, coming to understand God in the way Aquinas spoke has been very helpful for me. I think of David Bentley Hart's book The Experience of God as a good explanation for how God is Being outside of nature. What this means is there is nothing science can discover that would challenge God as God is wholly other than science.
So yeah, there's a lot I found fantastic about Gregory's book. One part I struggled with was his blaming of the Reformation for much that went wrong in modernity. For example, The Reformation got rid of papal authority and replaced it with sola scriptura. Gregory shows that the promise that Christians could unite on the Bible failed, as no one could agree on the Bible. This division then led to removing the Bible in place of reason, though of course reason also has not brought unity in ethics. The other parts of the story take the same route - once the regulation of the late medieval Catholic church was removed, the cat was out of the bag and running into modernism and secularism.
I don't think Gregory is wrong on the connection between the Reformation and modern philosophy and secularism. Further, I am wrong, probably, in using the word "blaming" above. But at times Gregory does come off a bit simplistic, as if avoiding the Reformation would have kept everything hunky-dory. He fairly points out the issues in the Catholic church, how many leaders did not live up to their own standards. Yet this is the problem. He says in the past the Catholic church was able to handle self-critique and change. When Luther attacked indulgences, there was no interest in hearing his case. And the indulgences were really ruining people in Germany. If the Reformation opened up some problems, the resistant-t0-change Catholic church needs its share of blame too.
It was also interesting that the invention of the printing press was barely mentioned. One reason the Reformation took hold was because more people could read and pamphlets could be printed more quickly. Historical counter-factuals are always iffy, but if the Reformation had not happened in the 1500s, something would have happened. With printing presses more people would read more and think more and be critical of the institutions over them. Our secular world might look different, but I doubt Christendom would be around in the 2000s.
Finally, Gregory does really well in pointing out what was wrong with the Reformation and late-medieval Catholicism. But he does not offer much in terms of solution. The conclusion does give some ideas. As I read, I honestly at times thought his solution would be for everyone to unite under the pope. I guess he knows that's not about to happen. His idea for a way forward is for academics to be more open to explanations outside their accepted naturalistic worldview. I fully agree, though I won't hold my breath. It makes me think of Jacques Ellul's Technological Society where he flat out says there is no solution to what he is about to explain. I kind of wish Gregory had said that. Or even offered some ideas for how to live in this secular age.
I mean, most of us are not academics. But we have to wrestle with how to live as faithful people in a capitalist consumerist society. What would Christian unity look like when the old divisions of the 1500s-1800s seem outdated (Reformed/Lutheran vs. Catholic) and new divisions (liberal/progressive vs. evangelical) are apparent. Even for many non-Catholics, the Pope is still a sort of leader we all admire. How does the growth of faith in the global south and around the world relate? Western Christianity may have been unified, but Greek Orthodox would always say they were the true church so Christianity was not unified even in medieval era.
All in all, this was a fantastic book. I guess wrestling with how to live as a disciple today, knowing the truth of the stories Gregory has shared, is up to the readers.
May 20, 2016
This is an assumption rattling book. Brad S. Gregory presents a viewpoint outside the evangelical mainstream, but then, of course, it demands answering whether, according to 2000 year history of Christianity, evangelical thinking is, in fact, "mainstream."
One of the achievements of this book is that it forces the issue: how many of your assumptions are only of recent and modern origin? When adopting an assumption, do you even imagine the consequences of that assumption? Often you do not, because often, you absorb assumptions without even intentionally or consciously adopting them. And if you allow that, then that means that others (whether Luther, Calvin, Hobbes or Hume) have given you your assumptions without your even bothering to pay any attention to them. That means that you are letting others do some of your very most important thinking for you - and shape who you are.
Moreover, once you do pay attention, what does it mean if some of your assumptions were rejected by a historical majority of wise, intelligent and educated people - or, for that matter, by most of small-o orthodox Christianity for thousands of years?
For example, let's say you believe that a person's identity is whatever that person wills or wants his or her identity to be. Would it matter to you if there was a great historical battle thousands of years ago that directly led to your own present day belief? It might sound boring when you read about theologians splitting hairs and distinctions such as whether goodness is because God wills it or whether God wills it because it is goodness, but what if some of these debates made us who we now are?
What if the same debate moved out of theology into philosophy, where some philosophers simply argued that it's good BECAUSE one wants it, and it's bad BECAUSE one doesn't want it? And then, what if one side of the debate prevailed, not by rational argument, but by suppressing the debate, disemboweling education in the process, and getting to the point where almost everyone just took their arguments for granted by default without even thinking about them? What if things moved to the point where the average educated person doesn't even know that there is such a thing as Euthyphro's dilemma?
And then, what if someone like John Calvin decided that Socrates' shredding of Euthyphro was something best not paid any attention to at all, and built a theology based on Euthyphro's uncritical assumptions. And then what if Calvin's theology unintentionally became secularized, moved outside of theology, and turned purely into abstract, surreal cultural discussions over what is it possible for a person to will - merely to will (like one of the X-men) against any material or immaterial reality, because human will is, above all else, the greatest good?
Asking questions like this is hard work, but it's also reinvigorating. I am becoming more and more interested in the fact that the Ancient and Medieval world assumed that one's thinking partly shaped the reality that one lives in and perceives, and in the fact that these assumptions were replaced during the Scientific Revolution/Enlightenment by the insistence that material reality could not be composed partly of mind. Whether you like it or not, metaphysics shapes some of your most important assumptions. These assumptions fundamentally guide the most important decisions you make in your life as well as how you live and experience your life, day to day.
I just finished reading Gregory's 'The Unintended Reformation.' You should probably read it too. These are questions we should be paying attention to.
One of the achievements of this book is that it forces the issue: how many of your assumptions are only of recent and modern origin? When adopting an assumption, do you even imagine the consequences of that assumption? Often you do not, because often, you absorb assumptions without even intentionally or consciously adopting them. And if you allow that, then that means that others (whether Luther, Calvin, Hobbes or Hume) have given you your assumptions without your even bothering to pay any attention to them. That means that you are letting others do some of your very most important thinking for you - and shape who you are.
Moreover, once you do pay attention, what does it mean if some of your assumptions were rejected by a historical majority of wise, intelligent and educated people - or, for that matter, by most of small-o orthodox Christianity for thousands of years?
For example, let's say you believe that a person's identity is whatever that person wills or wants his or her identity to be. Would it matter to you if there was a great historical battle thousands of years ago that directly led to your own present day belief? It might sound boring when you read about theologians splitting hairs and distinctions such as whether goodness is because God wills it or whether God wills it because it is goodness, but what if some of these debates made us who we now are?
What if the same debate moved out of theology into philosophy, where some philosophers simply argued that it's good BECAUSE one wants it, and it's bad BECAUSE one doesn't want it? And then, what if one side of the debate prevailed, not by rational argument, but by suppressing the debate, disemboweling education in the process, and getting to the point where almost everyone just took their arguments for granted by default without even thinking about them? What if things moved to the point where the average educated person doesn't even know that there is such a thing as Euthyphro's dilemma?
And then, what if someone like John Calvin decided that Socrates' shredding of Euthyphro was something best not paid any attention to at all, and built a theology based on Euthyphro's uncritical assumptions. And then what if Calvin's theology unintentionally became secularized, moved outside of theology, and turned purely into abstract, surreal cultural discussions over what is it possible for a person to will - merely to will (like one of the X-men) against any material or immaterial reality, because human will is, above all else, the greatest good?
Asking questions like this is hard work, but it's also reinvigorating. I am becoming more and more interested in the fact that the Ancient and Medieval world assumed that one's thinking partly shaped the reality that one lives in and perceives, and in the fact that these assumptions were replaced during the Scientific Revolution/Enlightenment by the insistence that material reality could not be composed partly of mind. Whether you like it or not, metaphysics shapes some of your most important assumptions. These assumptions fundamentally guide the most important decisions you make in your life as well as how you live and experience your life, day to day.
I just finished reading Gregory's 'The Unintended Reformation.' You should probably read it too. These are questions we should be paying attention to.
January 9, 2024
Most of those who unknowingly conflate their metaphysical assumptions with the findings of the natural sciences regard the relationship between science and religion as a competitive, zero-sum game. Thus they confuse success in explaining natural regularities with the allegedly diminished plausibility of the claims of any and all revealed religions. In fact, any and all possible discoveries of the natural sciences are compatible with the reality of a transcendent creator-God understood in non-univocal terms, whether in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. It is unsurprising that this recognition is not widely understood, given the sociological fact that most scholars and scientists tend to be notably (but explicably) lacking in theological sophistication and self-awareness of their own metaphysical beliefs.
Contrary to widespread assumptions, the findings of the natural sciences accordingly provide no legitimate intellectual grounds for an a priori exclusion of all religious truth claims from academic discourse. . . . one important reason for wanting to keep religious discourse out of the public sphere and the secularized academy [was that] it protects one sort of substantive challenge to late Western modernity’s core ideology of the liberated and autonomous self. No matter what, each neo-Protagorean individual must be the sovereign of his or her own Cartesianized universe, determining his or her own truths, making his or her own meanings, and following his or her own desires. This is a nonnegotiable sine qua non of Western modernity in its current forms. It is also a major reason why it is failing. . . .
Some intellectually sophisticated postmodern critics who are religious believers have gotten behind and underneath modernity’s secularist assumptions and offered explanatorily powerful interpretations of their implications. The governing modern ideology of liberalism is failing in multiple respects. It lacks the intellectual resources to resolve any real-life moral disagreements, to provide any substantive social cohesion, or even to justify its most basic assumptions. In a reversal of the situation common in the nineteenth century, now it is many secular academics who tend to be uncritically complacent about the historical genesis of and intellectual grounds for their beliefs, oblivious of what Steven Smith has recently exposed as their “smuggling” of premises and assumptions insupportable within naturalist assumptions. Therefore, consistent with the academy’s commitments to the open pursuit of intellectual inquiry without ideological restrictions, to critical rationality, to the importance of rethinking and reconsidering, to the questioning of assumptions, to academic freedom, and motivated by the desire to shed light on our current problems and to seek more fruitful ways to address them, the contemporary academy should unsecularize itself. It should become less ideologically narrow and closedminded, opening up the Weberian “iron cage of secular discourse.” . . . Unsecularizing the academy would require, of course, an intellectual openness on the part of scholars and scientists sufficient to end the longstanding modern charade in which naturalism has been assumed to be demonstrated, evident, self-evident, ideologically neutral, or something arrived at on the basis of impartial inquiry.
(Get 'em, Brad!)
January 26, 2013
Brad Gregory is an outstanding scholar. The premise of his book is that our modern secular Western world is not so much the result of the Enlightenment but of the Reformation. It is the unintended result of the Reformation, born on the faulty foundation of sola scriptura as the sole determinant of Christian faith and practice. He discusses his thesis from six different aspects of modern life, including his own realm of academia. His analysis is certain to be discussed for decades, at least among academics, for the text is written for those with a good Masters level understanding of Reformation and Counter-Reformation theology and history. Consequently, some of those he wishes to reach, especially in academia, will not hear because they lack the requisite foundation. The wealth of knowledge, the breadth of topic, the preciseness of his wording and argumentation leaves no question that we are dealing with a giant of a scholar. Protestants may squirm as he deftly exposes the weaknesses of their self-view. Catholics may be uncomfortable as he discusses the Church's more sordid past. My disagreements with the book are in that it posits Christianity as if it were defined in the Middle Ages by Roman Catholicism alone (Eastern Orthodoxy, the Coptic churches and others do not count), by his insistence on the potential apocalyptic affect of global warming (a topic for which I share his concern but for which Gregory lacks the expertise on which to comment and thus should have left out of his book) and his claim that Modernity is failing. Failing in what sense? He does not say. Finally, there is his appeal to readmit religious truth claims back into the research university as a legitimate way of exploring ultimate truth and Life Questions. Yet how their readmission will resolve anything he cannot say. Do we admit all religious truth claims into the research university, or only some? Who arbitrates this readmission? What a quagmire this would create. Furthermore, if research universities remain legitimate places for such discussions, then is not Modernity in some sense succeeding, thus refuting one of his claims? Despite these concerns, I nonetheless believe his analysis will be explored for decades to come, influencing how we understand the modern world.
August 11, 2015
This deserves a MUCH more complicated review. Basically all that is wrong (in Gregory's view) with the modern world (continually fragmenting of knowledge, lack of consensus about the good life or what truth is) can be traced to the Reformation. Reformers didn't mean to do this, but by moving away from tradition and authority regarding what scripture/truth means, and by allowing theological debate to center on people's opinion, they undermined the idea that truth could be determined and decided. And that's the problem with the modern world. I reject several premises here, but this sort of wide-ranging history and showing how things changed as a result of these intellectual movements in the 16th century, is really really useful and impressive. And has generated TONS of scholarly debate.
February 27, 2014
Heavy inspirational theses on the unintended consequences of the Reformation in England. William Faulkner once said 'The past is never dead..its not even past' The reformation is between middle ages and modernity and therefore Gregory argues, is accountable for much of where we find ourselves today. It argues that culturally the enlightenment, the Industrial revolution shaped and inspired 19th century philosophical ideology..the French revolution and European sensibilities were an aftermath or even a direct consequence and even USA written in the constitution of unequivocal Protestant influence have formed their code of living as a direct consequence of the shock of the wake of Reformation. His chapters which take in relativity of doctrine, control of churches, subjectivizing morality, manufacturing and the protestant work ethic, and finalising on the secularizing of knowledge...Universities and the separation of knowledge from faith, not as a comparison of AND but as a definitive contrast of OR ...creating an intentional 'other'. Makes for facinating extremely thought provoking material....a must on the shelves of those interested in social development in a refreshing light of religious history. The question begs 'Has the redefinition of social norms or those that have been historically linked to history as 'social norms' often... perhaps undoubtedly founded on early Christian morality, has this shifting of boundaries contributed to the precarious condition of the current global state ?
December 5, 2015
Pretentious, ponderous, inefficient and effective, takes 20 pages what could be said in one page. Did not finish, did not keep.
Read
September 16, 2020This was a long and heavy read. Gregory points to the long lasting and current consequences of the Protestant Reformation, consequences which transformed the Western Transatlantic world.
Much of modern, post-religious, discourse on Human Rights rests on the knowledge that fundamentally humans are made in the image of God. Reformation era ideas and developments are influential in the 21st Century. Our 21st century ideas can be understood and a continuation and extension of late medieval reformation ideas.
Much of modern, post-religious, discourse on Human Rights rests on the knowledge that fundamentally humans are made in the image of God. Reformation era ideas and developments are influential in the 21st Century. Our 21st century ideas can be understood and a continuation and extension of late medieval reformation ideas.
December 31, 2020
One benefit for me of reading this book: it provides a clear explanation of what underlies the thinking of most of the people around me in society today, including the reasons that thinking doesn't seem to make much sense. The intended purpose of the book is to explain how this shared worldview developed over hundreds of years (starting well before the Reformation). That explanation is deep, subtle and technical--and slightly over my head--but I suspect it is a work of genius. That explanation helped me understand why the way history and philosophy was taught to me didn't make much sense. Few books I've read in my entire life have helped me understand life as much as this one.
December 22, 2023
قرأته بترجمته العربية عن مركز نماء للبحوث والدراسات وعنوِن بـ: الإصلاح غير المنشود ، الثورة الدينية وعلمنة المجتمع
May 22, 2017
Teos on massiivinen tietopaketti, joka selittää miksi elämme sellaisessa maailmassa kuin elämme. Gregoryn pääväite on, että vastoin reformaattoreiden toiveita reformaatio vaikutti odottamattomilla tavoilla yhteiskuntaan. Gregory selvittää syyt ja historialliset kehityslinjat maallistumiseen, läntisen maailman äärimmäiseen pluralismiin suhteessa kysymyksiin tarkoituksesta, moraalista, arvoista ja merkityksestä, valtioiden nousuun kirkkojen yläpuolelle, moraalin muuttumiseen subjektiiviseksi, kapitalismin kehittymiseen, yliopistojen sekularisaatioon ja tieteen ja uskonnon eroon. Tiedon määrä on valtava. Kirjassa on paljon ennen kuulumattomia näköaloja ja oivalluksia historiaamme ja sitä myötä myös nykyhetken kysymyksiin.
October 3, 2022
9.5/10.
A truly outstanding book of intellectual history. To begin a summary, let us go back to the 1400s:
The Catholic Church rules Europe. There is one faith, one West, one Christendom. There are local heterogeneities and traditions, but the virtues of caritas (love), temperance, and devotion rule private and public life. Faith is growing in the laity, but the Church itself seems to be corrupt. For hundreds of years before, there has been a struggle to reform the Catholic Church, to make its leaders conform to the doctrines of Christ: to self-abnegate, to value helping others over amassing wealth themselves, to live in relative poverty instead of flourishing their luxurious living. The rise of monasteries and nunneries was a big part in this rise of popular piety.
But still the discrepancy between Christ's word and the Church's practice remained. Renaissance thinkers, like Erasmus and Savanarola, lambasted the church for this practice. But the solution was internal. There was only one dogma, one belief system. Conformance to Christ was the problem (there was no other way to conform to Him in the West other than through the Church).
Then the Reformation happens. Its prime principle, as opposed to the Catholics, was sola scriptura. Look at God's word, not at the false additions of the Church! But what immediately happens? Christianity and its doctrines splinter, again and again. Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and Wesley and all the other leaders of Protestant sects interpreted scripture differently. But how could one argue about the scripture? Without any tradition, there will be conflicting interpretations of a book that has 788 thousand words. One will quote James on the importance of works, the other Romans in favor of salvation through faith alone. If I read scripture, and I believe that scripture alone works through me and gives me the truth (through the Holy Spirit), and I reach a different conclusion than someone else, nothing stops me from creating a different Christian sect, given that theology.
But what if I meet someone whose interpretation conflicts with mine? There are two options. First, I can fight them. For, if someone is sinning against God Himself, is that not worse than if someone breaks a petty law? Is not God's law higher than man's law? Thus the religious wars of the 1500s and 1600s break out. They are completely logical, given the beliefs of Europeans at the time.
But to fight one another, versions of Christianity tie themselves to states. Anglicanism ties itself to England, Calvinism to Geneva, and Catholicism to Spain. The states take control over the religion. Instead of the Catholic Church determining how one worships across all of Europe, national states assert themselves vis-a-vis other states. States can now determine how one worships. From here we get the modern condition of our state determining how we can worship. It tells us when we are free to worship (not in public schools in the US), if we are free to worship at all (not in the USSR), or if we must worship in a certain manner (Calvin's Geneva). The key point here is that the state determines how we worship. It can decide to give us the freedom to worship, the inability to worship at all, or a mandatory worshipping of a certain god — but, whatever the state's choice, it determines the range of belief.
Some states, beginning in the mid-1600s, determined that they were most successful if they implemented "freedom of religion". In other words, there was no public morality. Public morality would be "whatever", as long as you do not impinge upon the newfound "rights" of another. This is directly derivative from the immensely deadly religious wars of the previous century (1/3 of Germans were killed). Holland was the first to implement this public morality of rights, as opposed to religious duties and a public/private religious unity.
Thinkers like Locke and Hobbes, the forefathers of liberal political theory, traveled to Holland and greatly praised its religious tolerance. Instead of fighting each other over metaphysically complete visions of reality, the Dutch had another business: base trade. They could agree on one thing: it is good to make money. The Sephardic Jews, coming to Holland (a Spanish colony) after the Inquisition in the 1500s, surely helped this process. Thus modern capitalism and consumerism are rooted in the response to the European religious wars, which are rooted in the irreconcilable views of scripture and dogma that came into being after the Reformation. America and England would take the Dutch view of reality — the variety of Christianity matters not as long as one can agree on a basic public morality and making money — and would become the industrial and consumerist capitals of the world.
So no one can agree on Christianity anymore. Protestantism has obliterated any shared sense of doctrine, and nobody seems to be getting close to agreement. What is the answer? Rationalistic philosophy! Through the power of "reason", we can reach a shared and assuredly rational view of reality. Thus Descartes questions literally everything (right as the religious wars are going on). Thus Spinoza sets up a geometric proof of reality. Thus Kant believes he can rescue Christian morality through the powers of reason. But the philosophers keep coming — Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer — with most of their ethics, epistemologies, and metaphysics being completely contradictory. Only one can be correct, as determined by the principle of non-contradiction. But they all disagree! It seems that "reason" is not so uniform; no, it leads in manifold and tangled directions.
Thus philosophy knots itself into the same conundrum of post-Reformation Christianity. Just as sola scripture led to an immense fracturing of Christendom, so too philosophy (sola ratio) led to an immense fracturing of thought (to this day there is no solution, no agreement whatsoever — and no way of deciding what is right due to totally different implicit premises of philosophers). But one realm unified itself. This was science. If we cannot agree on theology, nor on philosophy, can we not at least look at the natural world and see the same thing?
Thus modern science begins its ascent right near the eclipse of the European religious wars. The Catholic Church is unfortunately side-swiped by Galileo in its attempt to hold Aristotelian naturalism (which appears to be false, even though Aristotelian ethics is true). Newton unifies the laws of physics, showing the physical world to be mechanistic and governed by mathematics. Believing God to be the Greatest Being, and with His laws running this world, what job is there for Him to do? Is he just a watchmaker, watching his previously-made creation run? This is very unbiblical.
But as time goes on and scientists find more mathematical rules, this belief continues. Underlying it all is John Duns Scotus and his belief in univocity. He believed that God is, in essence, the greatest being. When we say God is good and John Doe is good, we are saying the same thing to a different degree. This takes God away from our world, and creates an unbridgable separation between Him and us. He is up there, and we are down here. If univocity is true, God and I cannot be in the same place. Physical laws and God cannot be in the same place. Thus univocity (Scotism) paves the way for modern atheism when it is tied with the increasing success of scientific investigations.
But univocity is a hypothesis. Let's think of the opposite of univocity. As opposed to God being a being, he is instead Being itself. He is not good, but Goodness itself. He is not just, but Justice itself. If God is not a being, then he can be all around us and in us. Being complete spirit, and having no body, He can be in us and in bread and wine. Being not a being, but Being itself, God can be fully in Christ while Christ is fully human.
But that is not the direction that modern man has taken. Atheism has instead taken root. Skepticism, atheism, and rationalism first took root in intellectuals in one of the countries most ravaged by the religious wars, France (Voltaire, Bayle, Diderot). Add to that an implicit view of univocal metaphysics and the newfound mathematical laws of Newton, and you get an intellectual class more and more in favor of deism and atheism. However, the populace was still religious.
But now, due to the "right" of freedom of religion, religion had been taken out of public life. It was up to private individuals and institutions to maintain Christianity. But with no public protection, subterranean forces could attack and revile Christianity. The very foundation of the West could be undermined. If the newspapers, televisions, radios, and movies turn against Christ, then who can stop them? If there is now a "right" to freedom of speech (after the Reformation -> religious wars -> liberal political theory), then who can stop the pushers of lies? No one. And thus the private sphere — wealthy corporations led by hateful internationalists — destroys the very foundations of civilization: the family, religion, and a notion of public duty. Here we are. Individualism has turned into the right to trannify your children, turn your hair blue, and take mountains of pills due to your own bad choices. What an unfortunate legacy the Reformation and its cosmopolitan hijackers have left us.
A truly outstanding book of intellectual history. To begin a summary, let us go back to the 1400s:
The Catholic Church rules Europe. There is one faith, one West, one Christendom. There are local heterogeneities and traditions, but the virtues of caritas (love), temperance, and devotion rule private and public life. Faith is growing in the laity, but the Church itself seems to be corrupt. For hundreds of years before, there has been a struggle to reform the Catholic Church, to make its leaders conform to the doctrines of Christ: to self-abnegate, to value helping others over amassing wealth themselves, to live in relative poverty instead of flourishing their luxurious living. The rise of monasteries and nunneries was a big part in this rise of popular piety.
But still the discrepancy between Christ's word and the Church's practice remained. Renaissance thinkers, like Erasmus and Savanarola, lambasted the church for this practice. But the solution was internal. There was only one dogma, one belief system. Conformance to Christ was the problem (there was no other way to conform to Him in the West other than through the Church).
Then the Reformation happens. Its prime principle, as opposed to the Catholics, was sola scriptura. Look at God's word, not at the false additions of the Church! But what immediately happens? Christianity and its doctrines splinter, again and again. Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and Wesley and all the other leaders of Protestant sects interpreted scripture differently. But how could one argue about the scripture? Without any tradition, there will be conflicting interpretations of a book that has 788 thousand words. One will quote James on the importance of works, the other Romans in favor of salvation through faith alone. If I read scripture, and I believe that scripture alone works through me and gives me the truth (through the Holy Spirit), and I reach a different conclusion than someone else, nothing stops me from creating a different Christian sect, given that theology.
But what if I meet someone whose interpretation conflicts with mine? There are two options. First, I can fight them. For, if someone is sinning against God Himself, is that not worse than if someone breaks a petty law? Is not God's law higher than man's law? Thus the religious wars of the 1500s and 1600s break out. They are completely logical, given the beliefs of Europeans at the time.
But to fight one another, versions of Christianity tie themselves to states. Anglicanism ties itself to England, Calvinism to Geneva, and Catholicism to Spain. The states take control over the religion. Instead of the Catholic Church determining how one worships across all of Europe, national states assert themselves vis-a-vis other states. States can now determine how one worships. From here we get the modern condition of our state determining how we can worship. It tells us when we are free to worship (not in public schools in the US), if we are free to worship at all (not in the USSR), or if we must worship in a certain manner (Calvin's Geneva). The key point here is that the state determines how we worship. It can decide to give us the freedom to worship, the inability to worship at all, or a mandatory worshipping of a certain god — but, whatever the state's choice, it determines the range of belief.
Some states, beginning in the mid-1600s, determined that they were most successful if they implemented "freedom of religion". In other words, there was no public morality. Public morality would be "whatever", as long as you do not impinge upon the newfound "rights" of another. This is directly derivative from the immensely deadly religious wars of the previous century (1/3 of Germans were killed). Holland was the first to implement this public morality of rights, as opposed to religious duties and a public/private religious unity.
Thinkers like Locke and Hobbes, the forefathers of liberal political theory, traveled to Holland and greatly praised its religious tolerance. Instead of fighting each other over metaphysically complete visions of reality, the Dutch had another business: base trade. They could agree on one thing: it is good to make money. The Sephardic Jews, coming to Holland (a Spanish colony) after the Inquisition in the 1500s, surely helped this process. Thus modern capitalism and consumerism are rooted in the response to the European religious wars, which are rooted in the irreconcilable views of scripture and dogma that came into being after the Reformation. America and England would take the Dutch view of reality — the variety of Christianity matters not as long as one can agree on a basic public morality and making money — and would become the industrial and consumerist capitals of the world.
So no one can agree on Christianity anymore. Protestantism has obliterated any shared sense of doctrine, and nobody seems to be getting close to agreement. What is the answer? Rationalistic philosophy! Through the power of "reason", we can reach a shared and assuredly rational view of reality. Thus Descartes questions literally everything (right as the religious wars are going on). Thus Spinoza sets up a geometric proof of reality. Thus Kant believes he can rescue Christian morality through the powers of reason. But the philosophers keep coming — Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer — with most of their ethics, epistemologies, and metaphysics being completely contradictory. Only one can be correct, as determined by the principle of non-contradiction. But they all disagree! It seems that "reason" is not so uniform; no, it leads in manifold and tangled directions.
Thus philosophy knots itself into the same conundrum of post-Reformation Christianity. Just as sola scripture led to an immense fracturing of Christendom, so too philosophy (sola ratio) led to an immense fracturing of thought (to this day there is no solution, no agreement whatsoever — and no way of deciding what is right due to totally different implicit premises of philosophers). But one realm unified itself. This was science. If we cannot agree on theology, nor on philosophy, can we not at least look at the natural world and see the same thing?
Thus modern science begins its ascent right near the eclipse of the European religious wars. The Catholic Church is unfortunately side-swiped by Galileo in its attempt to hold Aristotelian naturalism (which appears to be false, even though Aristotelian ethics is true). Newton unifies the laws of physics, showing the physical world to be mechanistic and governed by mathematics. Believing God to be the Greatest Being, and with His laws running this world, what job is there for Him to do? Is he just a watchmaker, watching his previously-made creation run? This is very unbiblical.
But as time goes on and scientists find more mathematical rules, this belief continues. Underlying it all is John Duns Scotus and his belief in univocity. He believed that God is, in essence, the greatest being. When we say God is good and John Doe is good, we are saying the same thing to a different degree. This takes God away from our world, and creates an unbridgable separation between Him and us. He is up there, and we are down here. If univocity is true, God and I cannot be in the same place. Physical laws and God cannot be in the same place. Thus univocity (Scotism) paves the way for modern atheism when it is tied with the increasing success of scientific investigations.
But univocity is a hypothesis. Let's think of the opposite of univocity. As opposed to God being a being, he is instead Being itself. He is not good, but Goodness itself. He is not just, but Justice itself. If God is not a being, then he can be all around us and in us. Being complete spirit, and having no body, He can be in us and in bread and wine. Being not a being, but Being itself, God can be fully in Christ while Christ is fully human.
But that is not the direction that modern man has taken. Atheism has instead taken root. Skepticism, atheism, and rationalism first took root in intellectuals in one of the countries most ravaged by the religious wars, France (Voltaire, Bayle, Diderot). Add to that an implicit view of univocal metaphysics and the newfound mathematical laws of Newton, and you get an intellectual class more and more in favor of deism and atheism. However, the populace was still religious.
But now, due to the "right" of freedom of religion, religion had been taken out of public life. It was up to private individuals and institutions to maintain Christianity. But with no public protection, subterranean forces could attack and revile Christianity. The very foundation of the West could be undermined. If the newspapers, televisions, radios, and movies turn against Christ, then who can stop them? If there is now a "right" to freedom of speech (after the Reformation -> religious wars -> liberal political theory), then who can stop the pushers of lies? No one. And thus the private sphere — wealthy corporations led by hateful internationalists — destroys the very foundations of civilization: the family, religion, and a notion of public duty. Here we are. Individualism has turned into the right to trannify your children, turn your hair blue, and take mountains of pills due to your own bad choices. What an unfortunate legacy the Reformation and its cosmopolitan hijackers have left us.
February 1, 2020
Every history graduate student should read Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation. It is a demonstrative example of what history can and should be: a moral argument. It is also an example of the worst kinds of pitfalls historians can make in crafting such a history. The Unintended Reformation is impressive in its scope and ambition but riddled with fallacies that dramatically inhibit its effectiveness in moral persuasion, the author’s seemingly primary aim.
Gregory argues that historical echoes from the Protestant Reformation, primarily the defiance of the authority of the Catholic Church and reliance on scripture alone in interpreting divine truth, have strongly, causally shaped the modern present, particularly the conditions of general hyperpluralism and moral relativism in the West. Gregory makes other claims that are wrapped up in this. He argues that periodization and overspecialization pervade the field of history and academia and distract scholars from causality and broader synthesis of meaning and that the moral bankruptcy of the contingent composition of modern liberalism makes it unsustainable. I believe that historians should make claims this bold, but not in such a way that we are blinded to reason by our believed righteousness of our cause. In this review, I will reinforce this claim with my own reasoning as well as Gregory’s and I will show the ways that Gregory’s zealotry significantly weakens his argument. But before those arguments can be made, a brief summary of The Unintended Reformation is needed.
Under his Catholic moral umbrella and hopes for the book’s impact, Gregory makes a six-fold argument that he summarizes in a succinct 24-page introduction. If those external influences are the book’s strategic framework, its more faulty, operational framework is composed of the historically contingent echoes supposedly produced by the Protestant Reformation that run down to the present. The operative thesis is simply asserted: “Together the [six] chapters constitute a whole that endeavors to explain major features of the world today as the unintended, long-term outcome of diverse rejections as well as variegated retentions and appropriations of medieval Christianity.” The “diverse rejections” and “variegated retentions” of the Reformation that Gregory focuses on, which he admits are merely demonstrative and not comprehensive, are: Shifting perceptions of God’s relationship to the universe (particularly the influences of metaphysical univocity and Occam’s razor), shifting foundations of truth and value claims from the Roman church to a reliance on scripture alone (sola scriptura), increasing secular oversight and control of religious institutions, a transition in ethical foundations from Christian, communal good to a formal ethics of rights, the emergence of capitalistic values of consumption and technological growth as fundamental displacers of the foundation of Western culture, and the increasing specialization and secularization of human knowledge and inquiry.
Despite the extraordinary breadth and complex interplay of these variables, on its face The Unintended Reformation seems like a good blueprint for an analysis of the West’s problems. But the very moral force that animates Gregory’s argument blinds or leads him to neglect logical holes in his analysis that are unacceptable for a professional historian. I turn to these problems before advocating the merits of moral advocacy in history and academia generally.
Combativeness atypical of contemporary historical work pervades The Unintended Reformation. It oftentimes reads as a Catholic assault on Protestantism, which could be forgivable if that sense didn’t blanket and cause clear argumentative flaws. Gregory views the Protestant Reformation unfairly as the seemingly singular cause of hyperpluralism in the West. Gregory views the Protestant Reformation as the origin point of this historical phenomenon in direct, hypocritical contradiction to his criticism of supersessionist views of history. Finally, and relatedly, Gregory views the Protestant Reformation not as a legitimate historical and moral response to the innate moral failings of a prevailing cultural moral fabric (which he describes as a mere “paradox” and not of any sort of a causal nature), but rather as a mere interpretation of foundational truth seemingly totally separate from the concrete factors of corruption in the Roman church. Each of these problems of perception and representation of the Protestant Reformation runs as an inseparable thread throughout the book, corrupting the entire analysis.
Two pages in the conclusion most clearly reflect all of these foundational argumentative assumptions, but many more could be drawn from the book as they are omnipresent. Gregory states that the Reformation is “the most important distant historical source for contemporary Western hyperpluralism” and that the Reformation was an obvious “failure” which was “derived directly from the patent infeasibility” of the reformers’ moral venture. The Western cultural and moral fabric is made of more variables than Christianity and it is older than the Roman church. None of those past variables are even more than cursorily mentioned in the book; pluralism was not directly caused by one thing, the Protestant Reformation, as Gregory hints towards but resists stating outright, and nor is its causality separable from the grand sweep of history that antedates the Reformation, even if the relative magnitude of prior developments is lesser. The presumption of intentionality of Protestant reformers by Gregory is the most heinous error. He describes developments supposedly caused by Protestants as a “failure” because he assumes that “Their repudiation [of the Catholic church] was not based primarily on…rampant abuses…sinfulness of many of its members, or entrenched obstacles to reform” but on the grounds that they perceived Roman Catholicism as “a perverted form of Christianity,” as if the “form of Christianity” was separable from widespread abuses in practice. But for Gregory, who projects his religious assumptions on to historical actors in assuming their intentions, and who is focused on viewing what historical contingencies have wrought in the present, they are separable. You can’t separate historical factors from cultural, intellectual, and religious developments, no matter your beliefs.
Gregory’s argument is thus significantly flawed at the operational level. At the higher, strategic level, where Gregory attempts to drive his normative thrust, The Unintended Reformation is noble and impressive. No one familiar with modern academia could deny the shocking level of specialization and detail of the disparate fields of knowledge that Gregory describes, nor the difficulty implicit in uniting them, nor the increasingly fractious nature of Western opinions and values. Whether or not you think those factors are problematic will strongly influence if you agree that it is a noble work, but it is an impressive one regardless; few historical studies address the environment surrounding their creation with such penetration.
The argument for objective morality that Gregory asserts is on the right track but blatantly misrepresentative of his opponents – another instance of his zealotry negatively affecting his argument. The growth of relativistic methodologies and atheism in academia is not the equivalent of genocide, rape, torture, and sex trafficking, and no relativistic moral culture is proven by citing only one physicist and one transhumanist. But Gregory isn’t totally misguided. It is especially poignant, shocking, and perverse that John Mearsheimer, an acclaimed and highly influential political scientist at the University of Chicago, advocated for an ethically neutral role for the university in shaping its students. The motto of UChicago, a global leader in social scientific inquiry and Mearsheimer’s employer, is “Crescat scientia; vita excolatur” – “Let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched.” That dependent clause has to be more than a public relations tool.
Moral arguments can and should be made by social scientists (including historians). Morality and knowledge are and should be inseparable, and where that morality is derived from is important, as Gregory recognizes. Inquiry for the sake of inquiry cannot prevail as the animating institutional value of academia. Such a value, unrooted in deeper moral purpose, would make inquiry itself at best inefficient at accomplishing its goals, should we take a consequentialist view of things, and at worst oppositional to the wellbeing of civilization, if it is completely coopted for immoral military research or uninhibited by ethical human experimental standards, for example. Gregory’s concluding sentence is a call for synthesis of human inquiry under a moral framework. He ends by asking, “But aren’t all these things parts of a single complex story?” My concluding question would be similar but more aggressive: If all research isn’t rooted in a definable and intellectually consistent moral purpose, what’s the point?
Gregory argues that historical echoes from the Protestant Reformation, primarily the defiance of the authority of the Catholic Church and reliance on scripture alone in interpreting divine truth, have strongly, causally shaped the modern present, particularly the conditions of general hyperpluralism and moral relativism in the West. Gregory makes other claims that are wrapped up in this. He argues that periodization and overspecialization pervade the field of history and academia and distract scholars from causality and broader synthesis of meaning and that the moral bankruptcy of the contingent composition of modern liberalism makes it unsustainable. I believe that historians should make claims this bold, but not in such a way that we are blinded to reason by our believed righteousness of our cause. In this review, I will reinforce this claim with my own reasoning as well as Gregory’s and I will show the ways that Gregory’s zealotry significantly weakens his argument. But before those arguments can be made, a brief summary of The Unintended Reformation is needed.
Under his Catholic moral umbrella and hopes for the book’s impact, Gregory makes a six-fold argument that he summarizes in a succinct 24-page introduction. If those external influences are the book’s strategic framework, its more faulty, operational framework is composed of the historically contingent echoes supposedly produced by the Protestant Reformation that run down to the present. The operative thesis is simply asserted: “Together the [six] chapters constitute a whole that endeavors to explain major features of the world today as the unintended, long-term outcome of diverse rejections as well as variegated retentions and appropriations of medieval Christianity.” The “diverse rejections” and “variegated retentions” of the Reformation that Gregory focuses on, which he admits are merely demonstrative and not comprehensive, are: Shifting perceptions of God’s relationship to the universe (particularly the influences of metaphysical univocity and Occam’s razor), shifting foundations of truth and value claims from the Roman church to a reliance on scripture alone (sola scriptura), increasing secular oversight and control of religious institutions, a transition in ethical foundations from Christian, communal good to a formal ethics of rights, the emergence of capitalistic values of consumption and technological growth as fundamental displacers of the foundation of Western culture, and the increasing specialization and secularization of human knowledge and inquiry.
Despite the extraordinary breadth and complex interplay of these variables, on its face The Unintended Reformation seems like a good blueprint for an analysis of the West’s problems. But the very moral force that animates Gregory’s argument blinds or leads him to neglect logical holes in his analysis that are unacceptable for a professional historian. I turn to these problems before advocating the merits of moral advocacy in history and academia generally.
Combativeness atypical of contemporary historical work pervades The Unintended Reformation. It oftentimes reads as a Catholic assault on Protestantism, which could be forgivable if that sense didn’t blanket and cause clear argumentative flaws. Gregory views the Protestant Reformation unfairly as the seemingly singular cause of hyperpluralism in the West. Gregory views the Protestant Reformation as the origin point of this historical phenomenon in direct, hypocritical contradiction to his criticism of supersessionist views of history. Finally, and relatedly, Gregory views the Protestant Reformation not as a legitimate historical and moral response to the innate moral failings of a prevailing cultural moral fabric (which he describes as a mere “paradox” and not of any sort of a causal nature), but rather as a mere interpretation of foundational truth seemingly totally separate from the concrete factors of corruption in the Roman church. Each of these problems of perception and representation of the Protestant Reformation runs as an inseparable thread throughout the book, corrupting the entire analysis.
Two pages in the conclusion most clearly reflect all of these foundational argumentative assumptions, but many more could be drawn from the book as they are omnipresent. Gregory states that the Reformation is “the most important distant historical source for contemporary Western hyperpluralism” and that the Reformation was an obvious “failure” which was “derived directly from the patent infeasibility” of the reformers’ moral venture. The Western cultural and moral fabric is made of more variables than Christianity and it is older than the Roman church. None of those past variables are even more than cursorily mentioned in the book; pluralism was not directly caused by one thing, the Protestant Reformation, as Gregory hints towards but resists stating outright, and nor is its causality separable from the grand sweep of history that antedates the Reformation, even if the relative magnitude of prior developments is lesser. The presumption of intentionality of Protestant reformers by Gregory is the most heinous error. He describes developments supposedly caused by Protestants as a “failure” because he assumes that “Their repudiation [of the Catholic church] was not based primarily on…rampant abuses…sinfulness of many of its members, or entrenched obstacles to reform” but on the grounds that they perceived Roman Catholicism as “a perverted form of Christianity,” as if the “form of Christianity” was separable from widespread abuses in practice. But for Gregory, who projects his religious assumptions on to historical actors in assuming their intentions, and who is focused on viewing what historical contingencies have wrought in the present, they are separable. You can’t separate historical factors from cultural, intellectual, and religious developments, no matter your beliefs.
Gregory’s argument is thus significantly flawed at the operational level. At the higher, strategic level, where Gregory attempts to drive his normative thrust, The Unintended Reformation is noble and impressive. No one familiar with modern academia could deny the shocking level of specialization and detail of the disparate fields of knowledge that Gregory describes, nor the difficulty implicit in uniting them, nor the increasingly fractious nature of Western opinions and values. Whether or not you think those factors are problematic will strongly influence if you agree that it is a noble work, but it is an impressive one regardless; few historical studies address the environment surrounding their creation with such penetration.
The argument for objective morality that Gregory asserts is on the right track but blatantly misrepresentative of his opponents – another instance of his zealotry negatively affecting his argument. The growth of relativistic methodologies and atheism in academia is not the equivalent of genocide, rape, torture, and sex trafficking, and no relativistic moral culture is proven by citing only one physicist and one transhumanist. But Gregory isn’t totally misguided. It is especially poignant, shocking, and perverse that John Mearsheimer, an acclaimed and highly influential political scientist at the University of Chicago, advocated for an ethically neutral role for the university in shaping its students. The motto of UChicago, a global leader in social scientific inquiry and Mearsheimer’s employer, is “Crescat scientia; vita excolatur” – “Let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched.” That dependent clause has to be more than a public relations tool.
Moral arguments can and should be made by social scientists (including historians). Morality and knowledge are and should be inseparable, and where that morality is derived from is important, as Gregory recognizes. Inquiry for the sake of inquiry cannot prevail as the animating institutional value of academia. Such a value, unrooted in deeper moral purpose, would make inquiry itself at best inefficient at accomplishing its goals, should we take a consequentialist view of things, and at worst oppositional to the wellbeing of civilization, if it is completely coopted for immoral military research or uninhibited by ethical human experimental standards, for example. Gregory’s concluding sentence is a call for synthesis of human inquiry under a moral framework. He ends by asking, “But aren’t all these things parts of a single complex story?” My concluding question would be similar but more aggressive: If all research isn’t rooted in a definable and intellectually consistent moral purpose, what’s the point?
November 1, 2020
Gregory offers a sweeping historical epic of the 500-year process by which medieval Western society, grounded in a common conception of the good secured by the medieval Universal Catholic Church and expressing itself in individual devotion to caritas in an imitation of Christ, was transformed into a hyperpluralistic, secular, individualistic and scientistic world. In this world, the closest approximation to moral consensus appears in the form of an arbitrary amalgam of rights that now allows for almost any behavior at all in what Gregory calls our current "Kingdom of Whatever". The blame for this transformation Gregory lays firmly at the feet of the Reformation. Even more specifically, its origin is the mistaken perception on the part of reformers that the need for reform arose from the unsound doctrine on which the 16th-century Church's teachings rested and not (the real cause) primarily because of the immoral behavior of Church leaders.
According to Gregory, we all continue to pay the price for this mistake in countless realms of modern society, though Gregory concentrates in his analysis on a few closely-related realms: the doctrine of toleration and its concordant rights-based legal system; hyperpluralism regarding the big questions of how one should live and what one should live for; consumerism; and, most importantly of all, the institutional production of knowledge and truth within the confines of the modern university.
Gregory's analysis is cogent, original, thought-provoking and fundamentally misguided. Regarding toleration and rights (which in Western legal and political systems have displaced if not thoroughly eradicated any place for shared conceptions of the good, i.e., in the ethical sense of substantive ends or goals), Gregory criticizes ruthlessly the vacuity and lack of nutritional satiety found in such a society as ours that is agnostic concerning any ultimate conception of the good. And one would be hard-pressed to counter that this hyperpluralist, anything-goes, consumerist world is not the moral vacuum that Gregory describes. And yet, what is the alternative? Gregory himself acknowledges that modern attempts to impose a conception of the good onto populations from the top down--as in Communist regimes--have been moral disasters. It's intellectually dishonest to denigrate rights-based legal systems knowing full well the Churchillian truth that this system is the worst possible arrangement and better than all the rest. Gregory never even attempts to offer any alternative, none that could be seriously advocated let alone implemented today without causing the same wide-scale destruction of life as the evil 20th century regimes Gregory cites.
Indeed it is in this respect that _The Unintended Reformation_ is, more than anything, a lament for a past age, despite Gregory's attempt to countermand a slide into mere nostalgia in the conclusion, the only part of the book in which he offers anything approaching concrete suggestions for an alternative to the nihilistic historical trajectory that the reformers set us all on. Even here, though, his suggestions only touch on one of the realms he analyzes.
In that conclusion, Gregory makes an appeal to "open up the university" to non-secular contributions to scholarship. Gregory's case here is built on an assumption that grounds and motivates the crux of his critique of university-produced knowledge and science in particular. Without this assumption, not even the paltry recommendations made in the conclusion hold up and the entire book, while worth reading as a fascinating genealogy of the modern secular society, becomes a lament with zero practical implications for changing any institutions whatsoever. This assumption is not only mistaken but even rather ridiculous and an embarrassing and, unfortunately, not trivial part of the entire argument. We might call this assumption Gregory's paranoid fantasy of the modern secular university.
The ultimate target of Gregory's fantasy is contemporary science and the scientists who drive it. Gregory believes that scientists either all or at least for the most part, and presumably as a condition of their pursuit of science at all, maintain a conscious commitment to scientistic naturalism, i.e. the contention that science holds an exclusive claim to all knowledge and that for anything to count as knowledge it must pass empirical verification. But not only that. Gregory claims that this commitment to scientistic naturalism seduces scientists into believing the fallacy that because the findings of science are true therefore the claims of religion must be false. In fact, though, we don't need to determine whether naturalism is true. We don't even need to determine whether scientists hold naturalism to be true. And we don't need to determine whether scientists hold the belief regarding the impossibility of theistic truth claims that Gregory attributes to them. All of these questions are irrelevant to the practice of modern science. Gregory's own fallacy here can easily be highlighted with a simple thought experiment: in world A, scientists have a conscious commitment to naturalism and believe that science has nullified the truth claims of religion; in world B, no scientists have a conscious commitment to naturalism and let's even say, to make the contrast clearer, they are all theists. The result is that the findings of science in both worlds is exactly the same. Zero difference. It's quite convenient for Gregory to posit a cabal in which the claims of religion cannot gain traction within science because the naturalist assumptions of scientists actively exclude religion from its game and for him to create a straw man who fallaciously claims that science has proven theism to be impossible. It would be much more difficult for him to acknowledge that, regardless of whether scientists hold the belief that Gregory imputes to them, the beliefs of scientists about science are not the same thing as the practice of science (nobody really cares how good scientists are at philosophy of science) and that what scientists believe about science doesn't affect the production of scientific knowledge any more than what they believe about love or God or flowers. Thus, unfortunately for Gregory, the purported naturalist commitments of scientists have no bearing on the truth status of theistic claims about the existence of God or the possibility of miracles. Even in a world in which no one was a naturalist, Gregory would still have to prove these claims the same way he would in this world. Between the two alternatives of hypothesizing an active banishment of religion from the university by an impersonal academic sentinel vs. actually making a plausible case for theism, Gregory clearly has chosen the easier of the two alternatives.
Not only does Gregory seem to believe in a cabal of hardcore naturalists actively excluding theistic claims from the realm of science, though, indeed in Gregory's eyes this describes what goes on in secular universities in general. In Gregory's paranoid vision of sour grapes, religion could make contributions to modern scholarship outside of theology, but the secular university just won't let it. Gregory talks about the "exclusion" of religion from the university, again, as if there have been meetings at which it has been decided that no religious claims shall ever be entertained at a university, regardless of the merits of those claims. He is clearly confusing cause and effect. Religious claims are considered all the time in a variety of contemporary fields of study. Philosophers of religion are constantly debating theistic claims regarding the existence of God, for example, or the possibility of miracles or the theistic grounding of ethics (divine command theory, for example). Gregory even cites philosophers like Alvin Plantinga who promote theistic arguments in the secular classrooms and journals that Gregory sees as beholden to a secularist agenda. (Even Gregory's book itself, which promotes several theistic claims, is published by Harvard University Press). And yet there's no denying that a university student is not going to encounter such theistic claims at the university in anywhere near the proportion that the student will encounter non-theistic scholarship. Why is that? Is it because of a prior agreement to exclude any contributions to scholarship with a religious origin? Or is it the more likely and, for scholars like Gregory, much more painful reason: that theistic scholarship is granted the same hearing at the "hyperpluralistic" modern university as any other type of scholarship, but fails on its own merits and not because of the barriers Gregory conveniently conjures into existence.
According to Gregory, we all continue to pay the price for this mistake in countless realms of modern society, though Gregory concentrates in his analysis on a few closely-related realms: the doctrine of toleration and its concordant rights-based legal system; hyperpluralism regarding the big questions of how one should live and what one should live for; consumerism; and, most importantly of all, the institutional production of knowledge and truth within the confines of the modern university.
Gregory's analysis is cogent, original, thought-provoking and fundamentally misguided. Regarding toleration and rights (which in Western legal and political systems have displaced if not thoroughly eradicated any place for shared conceptions of the good, i.e., in the ethical sense of substantive ends or goals), Gregory criticizes ruthlessly the vacuity and lack of nutritional satiety found in such a society as ours that is agnostic concerning any ultimate conception of the good. And one would be hard-pressed to counter that this hyperpluralist, anything-goes, consumerist world is not the moral vacuum that Gregory describes. And yet, what is the alternative? Gregory himself acknowledges that modern attempts to impose a conception of the good onto populations from the top down--as in Communist regimes--have been moral disasters. It's intellectually dishonest to denigrate rights-based legal systems knowing full well the Churchillian truth that this system is the worst possible arrangement and better than all the rest. Gregory never even attempts to offer any alternative, none that could be seriously advocated let alone implemented today without causing the same wide-scale destruction of life as the evil 20th century regimes Gregory cites.
Indeed it is in this respect that _The Unintended Reformation_ is, more than anything, a lament for a past age, despite Gregory's attempt to countermand a slide into mere nostalgia in the conclusion, the only part of the book in which he offers anything approaching concrete suggestions for an alternative to the nihilistic historical trajectory that the reformers set us all on. Even here, though, his suggestions only touch on one of the realms he analyzes.
In that conclusion, Gregory makes an appeal to "open up the university" to non-secular contributions to scholarship. Gregory's case here is built on an assumption that grounds and motivates the crux of his critique of university-produced knowledge and science in particular. Without this assumption, not even the paltry recommendations made in the conclusion hold up and the entire book, while worth reading as a fascinating genealogy of the modern secular society, becomes a lament with zero practical implications for changing any institutions whatsoever. This assumption is not only mistaken but even rather ridiculous and an embarrassing and, unfortunately, not trivial part of the entire argument. We might call this assumption Gregory's paranoid fantasy of the modern secular university.
The ultimate target of Gregory's fantasy is contemporary science and the scientists who drive it. Gregory believes that scientists either all or at least for the most part, and presumably as a condition of their pursuit of science at all, maintain a conscious commitment to scientistic naturalism, i.e. the contention that science holds an exclusive claim to all knowledge and that for anything to count as knowledge it must pass empirical verification. But not only that. Gregory claims that this commitment to scientistic naturalism seduces scientists into believing the fallacy that because the findings of science are true therefore the claims of religion must be false. In fact, though, we don't need to determine whether naturalism is true. We don't even need to determine whether scientists hold naturalism to be true. And we don't need to determine whether scientists hold the belief regarding the impossibility of theistic truth claims that Gregory attributes to them. All of these questions are irrelevant to the practice of modern science. Gregory's own fallacy here can easily be highlighted with a simple thought experiment: in world A, scientists have a conscious commitment to naturalism and believe that science has nullified the truth claims of religion; in world B, no scientists have a conscious commitment to naturalism and let's even say, to make the contrast clearer, they are all theists. The result is that the findings of science in both worlds is exactly the same. Zero difference. It's quite convenient for Gregory to posit a cabal in which the claims of religion cannot gain traction within science because the naturalist assumptions of scientists actively exclude religion from its game and for him to create a straw man who fallaciously claims that science has proven theism to be impossible. It would be much more difficult for him to acknowledge that, regardless of whether scientists hold the belief that Gregory imputes to them, the beliefs of scientists about science are not the same thing as the practice of science (nobody really cares how good scientists are at philosophy of science) and that what scientists believe about science doesn't affect the production of scientific knowledge any more than what they believe about love or God or flowers. Thus, unfortunately for Gregory, the purported naturalist commitments of scientists have no bearing on the truth status of theistic claims about the existence of God or the possibility of miracles. Even in a world in which no one was a naturalist, Gregory would still have to prove these claims the same way he would in this world. Between the two alternatives of hypothesizing an active banishment of religion from the university by an impersonal academic sentinel vs. actually making a plausible case for theism, Gregory clearly has chosen the easier of the two alternatives.
Not only does Gregory seem to believe in a cabal of hardcore naturalists actively excluding theistic claims from the realm of science, though, indeed in Gregory's eyes this describes what goes on in secular universities in general. In Gregory's paranoid vision of sour grapes, religion could make contributions to modern scholarship outside of theology, but the secular university just won't let it. Gregory talks about the "exclusion" of religion from the university, again, as if there have been meetings at which it has been decided that no religious claims shall ever be entertained at a university, regardless of the merits of those claims. He is clearly confusing cause and effect. Religious claims are considered all the time in a variety of contemporary fields of study. Philosophers of religion are constantly debating theistic claims regarding the existence of God, for example, or the possibility of miracles or the theistic grounding of ethics (divine command theory, for example). Gregory even cites philosophers like Alvin Plantinga who promote theistic arguments in the secular classrooms and journals that Gregory sees as beholden to a secularist agenda. (Even Gregory's book itself, which promotes several theistic claims, is published by Harvard University Press). And yet there's no denying that a university student is not going to encounter such theistic claims at the university in anywhere near the proportion that the student will encounter non-theistic scholarship. Why is that? Is it because of a prior agreement to exclude any contributions to scholarship with a religious origin? Or is it the more likely and, for scholars like Gregory, much more painful reason: that theistic scholarship is granted the same hearing at the "hyperpluralistic" modern university as any other type of scholarship, but fails on its own merits and not because of the barriers Gregory conveniently conjures into existence.
March 27, 2013
It is a bit difficult to know what to do with this book. Its central idea can be summed up in one sentence: By breaking up the unity of truth claims, the reformation spawned secular society. It is not a new or original claim, yet Gregory develops it over some 500 pages. It leans heavily of the work of people such as John Milbank and Alisdair MacIntyre, and does not in any way alter their accounts in any significant way. On the other hand it is not a introductory text either, its argument is quiet complex at times. This means that it occupies that awkward middle ground between a detailed historical study and a more grand-narrative type of story, which means I, for one, tend to nod in agreement a lot, but more because I already thought this way than because I learnt something new.
The strength, and thus also the weakness, of Gregory’s book is thus the level of detail he goes into. He actually tries to provied solid historical backing for his claims, tries to be sufficiantly nuanced in his arguing and show the complexity of historical events. This means that for those of us looking for a ”story” the text proceeds rather slowly at times, especilly since the story is largely familiar. On the other hand, then, much of this detail is interesting and useful, like the key role of the Dutch society acting like a experimental lab for secular society, and the wide variety of reformation thinkers that we seldom hear of today.
The best chapter to me is the one dealing with economy – which is a bit odd, since it is the one where Grigory’s theory doesn’t really work, and he actually tends to argue that the seculaisation of economy happened not because of the reformation but in spite of it. But what is good with this chapter is the way it shows how consistently Christians preached against what we today call capitalism, and yet continued to develop it in practice. There is much to be learned from this lesson.
The question is thus: for whom is this book useful. I’m thinking, first year doctoral students; but then, I want them to read MacIntyre and Milbank in the origianl, and I’m not sure if this book helps them with that or spoils some of the fun. Of course, for those studying secularisation per se, Gregory’s book is and will be essential for a long time.
The strength, and thus also the weakness, of Gregory’s book is thus the level of detail he goes into. He actually tries to provied solid historical backing for his claims, tries to be sufficiantly nuanced in his arguing and show the complexity of historical events. This means that for those of us looking for a ”story” the text proceeds rather slowly at times, especilly since the story is largely familiar. On the other hand, then, much of this detail is interesting and useful, like the key role of the Dutch society acting like a experimental lab for secular society, and the wide variety of reformation thinkers that we seldom hear of today.
The best chapter to me is the one dealing with economy – which is a bit odd, since it is the one where Grigory’s theory doesn’t really work, and he actually tends to argue that the seculaisation of economy happened not because of the reformation but in spite of it. But what is good with this chapter is the way it shows how consistently Christians preached against what we today call capitalism, and yet continued to develop it in practice. There is much to be learned from this lesson.
The question is thus: for whom is this book useful. I’m thinking, first year doctoral students; but then, I want them to read MacIntyre and Milbank in the origianl, and I’m not sure if this book helps them with that or spoils some of the fun. Of course, for those studying secularisation per se, Gregory’s book is and will be essential for a long time.
April 26, 2012
This makes me wish I had my old access to scholarly journals to see how the academy is reacting.
I am pro-anything that makes historians of the "modern era" have to pay attention to the Middle Ages/Reformations. When I studied that time period, I had to know about how the history/philosophy since the 16th century affected the books and articles I was reading, so I think it is proper that those who deal with times closer to the present see how the Middle Ages and Reformation still inform the present day.
There are two major points Gregory makes: 1. Western history is not a tale of progress that leaves religion behind. Much of Western fundamental beliefs have their roots in Christianity. 2. The Reformation shattered the Western consensus of what truth is and we've never been able to reach a consensus again. Instead we've come to a consensus that acquiring stuff is the way to live life.
It's an uneasy conclusion: the movement away from a moral consensus has left the West with no intellectual underpinning for our current outlooks, but the shift it made to science/natural philosophy has made our world materially better.
For me, I guess I wonder how the split in Christianity differs from splits in other moral pinnings in the non-Western world. He treated Islam as one coherent system, yet there are splits within it. And somewhat personally, I'd rather live in the "Kingdom of Whatever" than be seen as property of a man and/or be burnt as a witch. So while my intellectual underpinnings of the idea of equality may be shaky, I guess I have to go with my emotional feeling. Alas.
I am pro-anything that makes historians of the "modern era" have to pay attention to the Middle Ages/Reformations. When I studied that time period, I had to know about how the history/philosophy since the 16th century affected the books and articles I was reading, so I think it is proper that those who deal with times closer to the present see how the Middle Ages and Reformation still inform the present day.
There are two major points Gregory makes: 1. Western history is not a tale of progress that leaves religion behind. Much of Western fundamental beliefs have their roots in Christianity. 2. The Reformation shattered the Western consensus of what truth is and we've never been able to reach a consensus again. Instead we've come to a consensus that acquiring stuff is the way to live life.
It's an uneasy conclusion: the movement away from a moral consensus has left the West with no intellectual underpinning for our current outlooks, but the shift it made to science/natural philosophy has made our world materially better.
For me, I guess I wonder how the split in Christianity differs from splits in other moral pinnings in the non-Western world. He treated Islam as one coherent system, yet there are splits within it. And somewhat personally, I'd rather live in the "Kingdom of Whatever" than be seen as property of a man and/or be burnt as a witch. So while my intellectual underpinnings of the idea of equality may be shaky, I guess I have to go with my emotional feeling. Alas.
December 1, 2023
As Emil Cioran put it, the modern age begins with two hysterics: Martin Luther and Don Quixote; a thesis strongly backed up by the contents of this book, which analyses modernity not so much from the perspective of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, but as a consequence of the true revolution of modernity, the Reformation. Gregory writes from a Catholic perspective, in both good and bad: while this allows him to view the whole process of secularization against the lens of an older tradition it supplanted, a tradition he also believes in, it also means that he writes from a somewhat defensive-nostalgic perspective which leads to some incoherencies.
For example, he is quick to divorce religious truth claims from the purview of natural science when it suits him, yet later laments the disappearance of those truth claims from the teleology of academia. This might not be so problematic if he also didn't chastise the emptiness of the formal concept of rights as opposed to a teleology of virtue; for what else is the appeal for certain unjustifiable truth claims to be considered as universal truths but a desire for a merely ~formal~ universality? If we really do throw away the scripture and admit all the pagan themes in the Church Fathers and later Catholicism(see, for example, Pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite and Proclus connection, the Renaissance prisca theologia, Aristotle etc.), what remains as the basis of unification, when these alternative ideas in fact did contradict Christianity? For a fuller analysis of history, Catholicism would need to be implicated not only on the level of hypocrisy of practice, as in this book, but also on the level of doctrine, enabling a destructive counter-reaction such as that of Luther, which only seemed inevitable from the starting point he had. For an opposite approach to introduction of contradictory doctrines under the auspices of the universal Christian faith, one need only look towards Palamism, its attitude toward Hellenism and how Christianity developed therefrom: an easy counter-factual and a mirror through which to discern one's own features. Of course, they have their own failings and tragicomedies too, relating to the role of Pseudo-Dionysius in their theology, despite otherwise attempting some sort of purism without falling into the "problem of formality" plaguing the Protestant trajectory.
In my view, what we are dealing with as far as Catholicism and Reformation go is an interplay between two interpretations of universality: one seeking to (generously!) include every philosophy under the sun as an undeveloped manifestation of itself, the other seeking to exclude everything else so as to emphasize the essential characteristics of what would make it uniquely applicable as an universal truth. This also brings to mind, once again, Aristotle's category of substance and his secondary substance, and the endless interplay between them. The author contends that we are nowadays living in a totally hyperpluralistic era, but with some Christian leftovers holding it together: a situation which is inherently tense. But what if, after the Reformation reached the point of Enlightenment in its relentless deconstruction and atomization of everything, the new idea of progress in history, or what the author terms "supersessionism", became the spirit of universality as opposed to particularization of the Protestant mindset. In this analysis, the Humean rhetoric of passions would be only the most exoteric sliver of a more general belief in historical fatalism, most aptly exemplified in the theories of Hegel, vitalism, Spinoza etc. Here Cioran again comes handy, as always: “The evolving absolute, Hegel’s heresy, has become our dogma, our tragic orthodoxy, the philosophy of our reflexes.”
This worldview involves a pantheistic belief in a world spirit or anima mundi, known from Platonism and alchemistic thought: and of course, Hegel's thought is riddled with alchemy. This is then, roughly, the new religion: the ancient wisdom is what we see around us in the attempt to subvert nature and turn everything into its opposite, all in search of a perfection of the world spirit. The religious part is the idea that any of this involves a progression towards perfection instead of a simple beat-down of humanity, as depicted in the horrifying visions of Zosimos of Panopolis. Alchemy involves the extraction of spirit of matter through the destruction of the material body and then a re-materialization of that spirit back into the body. But like...what if it is just destruction? Here the Ancient Greek tale of Medea's deception of the daughters of Peleas is illustrative: she convinced the daughters that they could make their father young again if they only cut him up, put some herbs along with him, and cooked it: she demonstrated this successfully with a lamb, but had a secret ingredient she did not tell the daughters about, with the predictable result of the daughters being left with simply a cut-up father. Is there are more shudder-inducing tale considering the trajectory of our world today? But strangely, I find myself here relating with Martin Luther, even though he seemed a bit deranged...Does not the insanity of our times call for a new reformation, against the secular universalism, an exposure of the occult bullshit that has infested just about everything, at least in the West? Does the liberation lie really at the end of a linear progress or instead in a sideways shift to a completely new mode, a collective but non-institutionalist awakening?
That said, I do appreciate this line of inquiry, challenging as it does the simplistic narrative of the Enlightenment: it also gives guidelines towards an alternative philosophy of history. Maybe three stars is even too low: I got a lot out of the analysis of the relations between Reformation and the emerging state-powers, and the increasing wars. Here, of course, the influence of finance cannot be left unnoticed, since wars, projects etc. mean credit: after all, the international symbol for finance is of alchemical origin, being a caduceus, or a staff with two serpents coiled around it: it is something to be studied more, to be sure, starting with the Medici bank and its influence in Renaissance Italy of Ficino and other universalists. Reformation is IMPORTANT, much more important than the Enlightenment which is just a side consequence of reformation, but even more important is the whole trajectory of the Western Church. I guess the best takeaway I can end this review with is that we can't talk of intellectual history without church history...at this point, it's all church history.
For example, he is quick to divorce religious truth claims from the purview of natural science when it suits him, yet later laments the disappearance of those truth claims from the teleology of academia. This might not be so problematic if he also didn't chastise the emptiness of the formal concept of rights as opposed to a teleology of virtue; for what else is the appeal for certain unjustifiable truth claims to be considered as universal truths but a desire for a merely ~formal~ universality? If we really do throw away the scripture and admit all the pagan themes in the Church Fathers and later Catholicism(see, for example, Pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite and Proclus connection, the Renaissance prisca theologia, Aristotle etc.), what remains as the basis of unification, when these alternative ideas in fact did contradict Christianity? For a fuller analysis of history, Catholicism would need to be implicated not only on the level of hypocrisy of practice, as in this book, but also on the level of doctrine, enabling a destructive counter-reaction such as that of Luther, which only seemed inevitable from the starting point he had. For an opposite approach to introduction of contradictory doctrines under the auspices of the universal Christian faith, one need only look towards Palamism, its attitude toward Hellenism and how Christianity developed therefrom: an easy counter-factual and a mirror through which to discern one's own features. Of course, they have their own failings and tragicomedies too, relating to the role of Pseudo-Dionysius in their theology, despite otherwise attempting some sort of purism without falling into the "problem of formality" plaguing the Protestant trajectory.
In my view, what we are dealing with as far as Catholicism and Reformation go is an interplay between two interpretations of universality: one seeking to (generously!) include every philosophy under the sun as an undeveloped manifestation of itself, the other seeking to exclude everything else so as to emphasize the essential characteristics of what would make it uniquely applicable as an universal truth. This also brings to mind, once again, Aristotle's category of substance and his secondary substance, and the endless interplay between them. The author contends that we are nowadays living in a totally hyperpluralistic era, but with some Christian leftovers holding it together: a situation which is inherently tense. But what if, after the Reformation reached the point of Enlightenment in its relentless deconstruction and atomization of everything, the new idea of progress in history, or what the author terms "supersessionism", became the spirit of universality as opposed to particularization of the Protestant mindset. In this analysis, the Humean rhetoric of passions would be only the most exoteric sliver of a more general belief in historical fatalism, most aptly exemplified in the theories of Hegel, vitalism, Spinoza etc. Here Cioran again comes handy, as always: “The evolving absolute, Hegel’s heresy, has become our dogma, our tragic orthodoxy, the philosophy of our reflexes.”
This worldview involves a pantheistic belief in a world spirit or anima mundi, known from Platonism and alchemistic thought: and of course, Hegel's thought is riddled with alchemy. This is then, roughly, the new religion: the ancient wisdom is what we see around us in the attempt to subvert nature and turn everything into its opposite, all in search of a perfection of the world spirit. The religious part is the idea that any of this involves a progression towards perfection instead of a simple beat-down of humanity, as depicted in the horrifying visions of Zosimos of Panopolis. Alchemy involves the extraction of spirit of matter through the destruction of the material body and then a re-materialization of that spirit back into the body. But like...what if it is just destruction? Here the Ancient Greek tale of Medea's deception of the daughters of Peleas is illustrative: she convinced the daughters that they could make their father young again if they only cut him up, put some herbs along with him, and cooked it: she demonstrated this successfully with a lamb, but had a secret ingredient she did not tell the daughters about, with the predictable result of the daughters being left with simply a cut-up father. Is there are more shudder-inducing tale considering the trajectory of our world today? But strangely, I find myself here relating with Martin Luther, even though he seemed a bit deranged...Does not the insanity of our times call for a new reformation, against the secular universalism, an exposure of the occult bullshit that has infested just about everything, at least in the West? Does the liberation lie really at the end of a linear progress or instead in a sideways shift to a completely new mode, a collective but non-institutionalist awakening?
That said, I do appreciate this line of inquiry, challenging as it does the simplistic narrative of the Enlightenment: it also gives guidelines towards an alternative philosophy of history. Maybe three stars is even too low: I got a lot out of the analysis of the relations between Reformation and the emerging state-powers, and the increasing wars. Here, of course, the influence of finance cannot be left unnoticed, since wars, projects etc. mean credit: after all, the international symbol for finance is of alchemical origin, being a caduceus, or a staff with two serpents coiled around it: it is something to be studied more, to be sure, starting with the Medici bank and its influence in Renaissance Italy of Ficino and other universalists. Reformation is IMPORTANT, much more important than the Enlightenment which is just a side consequence of reformation, but even more important is the whole trajectory of the Western Church. I guess the best takeaway I can end this review with is that we can't talk of intellectual history without church history...at this point, it's all church history.
May 17, 2013
Kind of like Foucault, in a way -- the same changes everyone else has observed along the way to modernity, but it's bad not good. In Foucault's case, everything was getting staider, we were too self-controlled, we needed to get out more. In Gregory's view, since the Reformation, we've become morally unmoored, and "Judged on their own terms and with respect to the objectives of their own leading protagonists, medieval Christendom failed, the Reformation failed, confessionalized Europe failed, and Western modernity is failing..." Those Protestants wrecked everything. Attributes too much to Scotus and Occam (if they corrupted us, why did we listen?), and to cap it all off, even he admits that we need religious toleration, democracy, etc., so if modernity is so terrible, he doesn't paint any convincing picture of what would be better. Furthermore, the actual readings of texts (Machiavelli, Hobbes) strike me as boring and superficial. Although I agree with some of his proposed mechanisms for how we transitioned to a pluralistic society, I didn't find his account of the process particularly interesting. Worst thing about it: his defense of miracles. Best thing: he takes some key questions that I've discussed en coulisses (in the corridors) and puts them into print, and I'm not sure where else in print I've seen them. So I agree that Reformation debates structure a lot of our way of thinking about religion today, for example.
August 1, 2014
Gregory is an astounding scholar. The scope of what he handles here is enormous. I don't agree with his main emphasis about the Reformation, because there were plenty of antecedent factors in play that the Reformation merely exacerbated (cf. Mark Noll's lengthy response to Gregory online), but on the whole, this a book every serious scholar of the history of European/American ideology should read. Highly recommended.
April 25, 2014
The book for faculty book club this semester. I enjoyed our discussions, but the book was very difficult for me to read without background knowledge on the topic.
January 8, 2016
Pretty poor. A very flimsy argument for a book which makes huge claims. This is just going to confuse people.
January 9, 2018
This may be one of the most erudite and insightful books I have ever read. I have a bachelors in engineering and a masters in divinity, with two years of philosophy study crammed in between, and I needed every ounce of my education to understand Gregory's assertions, as he covers technology, history, society, philosophy, and theology seamlessly.
What is most incredibly about "The Unintended Reformation" is that it achieves Gregory's purpose of providing a genetic history of modern society, that is, showing how many of the characteristics of society today stem from choices made in the 16th century. Though Gregory is certainly no fan of the choices made or their results, at no point did I catch him giving unfair treatment to the historical facts, and at no point did I find his logic tortured or dishonest. Those who wish to defend the Reformers while opposing relativism or Capitalism will certainly be upset by Gregory's conclusions, but it is not Gregory's fault for brining to light an uncomfortable truth.
This book has leapfrogged "Bad Religion" as the book I am most likely to recommend to my friends who care about religion and society.
What is most incredibly about "The Unintended Reformation" is that it achieves Gregory's purpose of providing a genetic history of modern society, that is, showing how many of the characteristics of society today stem from choices made in the 16th century. Though Gregory is certainly no fan of the choices made or their results, at no point did I catch him giving unfair treatment to the historical facts, and at no point did I find his logic tortured or dishonest. Those who wish to defend the Reformers while opposing relativism or Capitalism will certainly be upset by Gregory's conclusions, but it is not Gregory's fault for brining to light an uncomfortable truth.
This book has leapfrogged "Bad Religion" as the book I am most likely to recommend to my friends who care about religion and society.
February 16, 2020
This is an important work tracing the foundations of modernity in the many unintended consequences of the Reformation. It is rigorously academic and assumes the reader will be familiar with a great deal of philosophical, theological, and historical knowledge. I personally preferred the earlier chapters the best as they seemed to flow together nicely in terms of content and argument. I did not find the later chapters on education and economics to be quite as compelling, although I did find the arguments compelling and well-established throughout. However, I have to agree with many of the other reviewers who have commented on the sheer length of the work making it an absolute Herculean effort to get through. Erudition does not necessarily demand such verbosity and a seemingly endless array of endnotes (yes, I neurotically read them all, and there are just far too many unnecessary references. There is an art to being focused and selective). I felt that this tendency really took away from the narrative force and general readability in too many places.
February 13, 2020
An excellent and exciting book. Dr. Gregory has synthesized a considerable body of facts into one of the clearest and most compelling arguments for the origins of contemporary pluralism and scientific materialism. If you want to understand why contemporary society has fractured into an endless number of ideologies dominated by a valueless secular system of conflicting truth claims-- this is one stop on your quest. I don't know if I completely buy every point in this book, and there are some important unanswered questions, but this was a refreshingly challenging and insightful book. It has clarified my thinking about the origin of modern secular culture completely.
February 19, 2023
kind of an ugly cover, but i guess that’s fitting
emperor’s new clothes-like, in that it identifies—quite persuasively in my opinion—the tautological nonsense and unmoored assumptions with which we western moderns clothe ourselves
but if you’re a prod you’ll probably be mad grouchy reading this
emperor’s new clothes-like, in that it identifies—quite persuasively in my opinion—the tautological nonsense and unmoored assumptions with which we western moderns clothe ourselves
but if you’re a prod you’ll probably be mad grouchy reading this
December 9, 2023
I normally don't comment on academic books here, but WOW, WOW!! Smartly argued, pertinent, thought-provoking, and a seminal work in intellectual history and the historiography of "secularism"/unbelief in the "West."
Displaying 1 - 30 of 56 reviews