In a recent phase of reflective rumination I have been thinking about the medieval world that I studied in college. As with the memory of old friends that spring unbidden to mind, one wonders about books one has read: what would one make of them now? I remember thirty years ago a confrère enthusiastically showing me a copy of Eamon Duffy’s landmark reappraisal of the ending of the medieval world of Catholicism, The Stripping of the Altars. Having cursorily looked through the book I decided it was not for me (more about why in a moment). But had I been too dismissive? This question began to haunt me – so I bought a copy.
The book’s cover promises a portrait of the church of late medieval English Catholicism as ‘a strong and vigorous tradition, and that the Reformation represented a violent rupture from a popular and theologically respectable religious system.’ This is clearly the perspective from which the book is written and its underlying paradigm. But, even before we get into the book, we are obliged to ask whether this is true? And was the shift to Protestantism that destroyed this world indeed ‘at first the work of a small minority’?
Though Duffy’s research is exemplary I find it remarkable that he fails to mention the authors of this ‘religious system’ – Aquinas and the scholastics – or its genesis (the word ‘Catholic’ was first used for this system in the fourteenth century), those who like William of Ockham challenged it, or the wider context of the growing ferment of ‘unorthodox’ ideas in the fourteenth and fifteenth century as the Conciliar movement that questioned the central authority of the Church from within.
Duffy’s defence is that this is a study of traditional religious piety and practices. And, to be sure, one book can’t be about everything. But is this entirely persuasive? Particularly as Duffy makes clear that a central concern of his book is to show ‘that no substantial gulf existed between the religion of the clergy and educated elite on the one hand and that of the people at large on the other.’ So presumably somebody understood the deeper theological issues presented, for example, by Ockham and the Spiritual Franciscans to which he belonged. In fact, the more one knows about this remarkable scholar the more one realises how radical and precociously ‘modern’ he was. For Ockham language was human convention, and morality was that which was reasonable rather than revealed. His later political works anticipate liberal democratic political thought and the rights of individuals to elect those in authority. These radical sentiments were welcomed across Europe, especially in nascent nation-states averse to papal autocracy and were taken up by reformers such as Jan Hus (1372–1415) and the subsequent Hussite rebels. So it is a surprise that Duffy seems in favour of a view of reform that was the work of a ‘small minority’ seemingly appearing from nowhere.
In an ominous portent of things to come, dogma was being challenged as early as the thirteenth century. The new empiricism, of the Franciscan Roger Bacon and Bishop Robert Grosseteste (‘bighead’!), would ultimately lead to our modern scientific culture. There was also a growing sense of the individual – a word that became current in the fifteenth century – as the receptacle of ‘natural’ rights that presaged the liberal, secular culture to come.
Though Duffy’s book presents endless examples of a traditional religious world of piety and devotion, it is never made clear where this ‘religious system’ came from. For example, the fulcrum of this world was the sacrifice of the Mass, devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, and veneration of the Body of Christ, Corpus Christi. But what did all these words mean and where did they come from? At one point Duffy refers to the ‘miracle of transubstantiation’ (p. 95) but fails to explain what this complex piece of pseudo-Aristotelian jargon meant and why it suddenly became so important. Similarly, we are told that ‘the primary mode of lay encounter with the Host’ was by visual observation, as if it was a magical symbol. But this was in clear contradiction of the dominical instruction to ‘Eat’. And the discussion concerning the elevation of the host during Mass fails to mention that the key reason for this was that the celebrant had turned his back on the congregation. But why had this happened? Lacking any explanation we are left wondering at the vehemence of the reformers.
A major complaint is that the book’s underlying paradigm – a vigorous Catholic tradition needlessly destroyed – is not only false, but only part of a much wider context. Duffy implicitly acknowledges this in his introduction when he refers to his growing up in Catholic Ireland in the 1960s at the time of the Vatican Council II, for the tumultuous changes that followed were analogous to the impact the Reformation had on medieval Catholicism. And the issues mentioned above are still toxic.
For many the epochal event of Vatican II likewise came out of nowhere in the midst of ‘a strong and vibrant tradition.’ When plans for a council were announced, Cardinal Heenan, head of the Roman Catholic Church in England, was asked what its purpose could be, could think of nothing other than perhaps to define a new Marian dogma. When its ramifications did become apparent ordinary Catholics were shocked beyond belief. Their whole world was threatened with destruction: not only were the altars stripped of their splendour to be replaced with cold stone blocks or tables, but sanctuaries were demolished with iconoclastic ruthlessness, vestments jettisoned and the language of the liturgy changed from the sacral Latin to the vernacular. Even the name of God was replaced by an incomprehensible and unpronounceable YAHWEH. And these were but a few of the changes that left devout Catholics reeling and their world in ruins.
Little wonder that many regarded this as a New Reformation, in opposition to which an angry reaction soon gathered pace in all sorts of Anti-Reformation movements, such as the Latin Mass Society. Once again the illusion was that all this had happened because of the work of a small minority intent on mischief against the faithful; and thus a certain congruence exists between Duffy’s thesis for the Reformation and how some people viewed the contemporary ‘renewal’. Does this betray a certain partiality? It is certainly grist to the mill for a certain kind of polemic, for history is not so much a study of the past as the present understanding of the past.
As I recount these events one can see the template for a view of history that looks back to the events of a similar trauma in the sixteenth century. Though it is very easy to see the changes of the Reformation as the work of a malicious minority, this movement did not come out of nowhere as some unexpected ‘violent rupture’. As with Vatican II, the Reformation was the result of centuries of cultural change. Some proposed exotic explanations, such as a demonic attack on the church by the agencies of evil in an apocalyptic struggle. But the truth was that in both the medieval and modern epochs, the whole epistemic and theological structure of a cultural world was disintegrating under the pressure of new knowledge and experience.
The point of this rumination is to suggest that the position an historian takes on one era will reflect the understanding he has of his own. The issues with which Duffy engages are not simply features of a distant past, for many Catholics they are live and volatile issues – often matters of personal anguish – that are difficult to address and even then only within a certain cultural paradigm. The priest who first showed me his copy of this book became in time more traditionalist and left the order. I also, unable to live with the reactionary church leadership that subverted the Vatican II agenda of renewal, left the order and the church.
Having said all this, I can appreciate the allure of this book and the attitude that underpins it – the view of a comforting lost world needlessly destroyed but with the possibility of restoration. I am still drawn to the ruins of those old monasteries and churches that adorn the countryside and can feel amongst them not an alien but an intimate – I understand not only their stones but the life that once breathed within them and that once I shared: the ruin of that way of life echoes the ruin of my own past.
In many ways the world of Duffy’s book was an enchanted creation that has captivated Gothic romanticists ever since. Yet that world, like Narnia and Middle Earth, was purely a creation of the human imagination, as Ockham precociously recognised. In the end we must, like the medieval empiricists, confront reality. So also with this book: it aspires to be an historical chronicle of the past, but it is even more a cypher for the present time, in which a lost world still lingers on in the imaginations of many.
Dominic Kirkham’s books include From Monk to Modernity (SOF 2015) and Our Shadowed World (Wipf and Stock, Eugene OR, 2019).