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R e v i e w
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This Rock
Volume 15, Number 10
 December 2004 
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Deformation of the Reformation
It is impossible to write a complete and impartial history of the Reformation. To do so, one would have to sift through two centuries of contentious history from more than two dozen countries written in almost as many languages—then make sense of the findings without injecting personal bias. No one has ever done it, including Diarmaid MacCulloch.
The casual reader might expect that an author with the mellifluous Gaelic name of Diarmaid MacCulloch would be biased in favor of the Catholic Church, or at least might treat it fairly. Such a reader will be disappointed by The Reformation: A History.
MacCulloch, professor of the history of the Church at Oxford, professes no dogmatic religious belief. He is the son of a long line of Scottish Anglican clergy (a denomination so obscure as to be unknown to my Scots mother-in-law—perhaps they meet in an Edinburgh pub before soccer games?). MacCulloch may be an agnostic, but he is a soundly Protestant agnostic, viewing his two centuries of history through a strongly anti-Catholic filter. He also commits surprising historical gaffes that are only partially excused by the size of his project.
For example, the introduction confidently tells us that Rome went into schism from "mainstream eastern Christianity" a thousand years ago. The Cappadocian Fathers—towers of Eastern spirituality who wrote eloquently about the Primacy of Peter—would have been amazed to discover that the East was the center and Rome the satellite.
MacCulloch is unaware that the ante-Nicene Church Fathers understood Christ to be truly present in the Eucharist. Your man credits Aquinas’s medieval repackaging of Aristotle for this belief rather than the Church’s consistent interpretation of John 6. He also attributes the primacy of the bishop of Rome to imperial politics and the site of the apostles’ tombs rather than the Fathers’ understanding of the keys (cf. Matt. 16) and shepherding (cf. John 21).
Similarly, MacCulloch’s equating of scholasticism and nominalism will amaze anyone who has ever heard of Aquinas and Ockham. There are few philosophies within Christianity that agree less often than scholasticism and nominalism.
His spin on the Crusades is predictable: The motive was military expansion of Christendom, not defense (or recovery) of ancient Christian lands suffering under Muslim aggression.
MacCulloch assumes that the Bible is a Protestant book, incompatible with Catholic belief or practice, and that the Church’s representatives had nothing to counter the challenge of the "reformers" beyond "appeals to authority." (In reality, Cardinal Cajetan’s scriptural defense of the faith devastated Luther’s arguments, but MacCulloch either is unaware of the well-documented exchange between the two men or chooses to hide it.)
Protestant craziness, such as the sharing of women by communist Anabaptist Muenster, was justified for the women’s "protection." Catholics’ virtue, though (such as the well-known refusal of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions to burn witches) is not to their credit, since their "paranoia" was already "fully employed" by their "pursuit [of] . . . secret Judaism or Islam."
MacCulloch has drunk deeply at the well of the "black legend" of Spanish perfidy. Thus, "Spanish racism" was obsessed with hostility to Jews and Muslims. Could that be why Jews preferred living in Spain? Prior to their expulsion in 1492, perhaps one-third of all persons living in Spain were practicing Jews or Catholics of Jewish origin like the families of Teresa de Jesus and John of the Cross.
Similarly, he slanders Cortez and the other conquistadores far beyond any balanced historical view. MacCulloch also ignores the Spanish crown’s efforts to protect the rights of the "Indios" and the obvious fact that those rights were respected well enough and often enough that the majority of people in Central and South America are of native origin. (A marked contrast to the outcome in the English North American colonies, not to mention parts of Ireland.)
As regards Luther, MacCulloch calls him "the best monk in Germany," apparently unaware of the many Protestant and Catholic biographers who agree that:
- Luther seldom bothered to say Mass, since
- he was terrified of confecting the Eucharist, apparently
- because he feared that God was as murderous a tyrant as Luther’s father had been, and
- he seldom read his daily Office,
- was troubled by absurd scruples (spending up to six hours on Saturday confessing), and
- refused to accept absolution after his six hours in the Confessional.
MacCulloch also alleges the absurd supposed antagonism between the Catholic faith and science, perhaps unaware that Catholicism is the only religion that states de fide that the human mind is capable of discovering truth through the careful use of reason. He ignores the fact that most early scientists were Catholic monks working inside the Catholic belief that God has created a universe based on laws that are intelligible to human reason.
MacCulloch is far less generous to the Church in the Galileo case—and far less accurate in his statement of facts—than was the atheist Arthur Koestler, who debunked most of the usual stereotypes and concluded that the Church’s approach to Galileo was justifiable under the circumstances.
MacCulloch is also apparently unaware of the 1,700-year-old Catholic opposition to unlimited government that was repackaged in the High Middle Ages by Thomas Aquinas and brought into play during the Reformation by Robert Cardinal Bellarmine and Francisco Suarez against the Protestant idea of the divine right of kings.
All these criticisms aside, MacCulloch does one thing rather well, no doubt unconsciously: He shows clearly, in nation after nation, how quickly departure from communion with Christ and his Church led to increasingly wild unbelief and increasingly violent, immoral, and antisocial behavior. For that reason, despite all its flaws, The Reformation makes instructive reading.
—Robin Bernhoft
The Reformation: A History
By Diarmaid MacCulloch
Viking
792 pages
$34.95
ISBN: 0670032964
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