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The Reformation The XVI century reformation arose largely in answer to the Protestant Reformation, which sometimes is called the Catholic Reformation, greatly changed European history. Although the Roman Catholic reformers shared the Protestants revulsion at the corrupt conditions in the Roman Catholic church, there was present none of the tradition breaking that characterized Protestantism. By this century, the corruption and bribery in the church was beginning to extend and becoming common phenomenon. In the meantime due to the development of the printed press, ordinary people were reading canons and dogmas for themselves. All these causes sparked a big resentment about the church.
With proceeding Renaissance and following French Revolution, the Reformation entirely changed the medieval way of life in Europe and commenced the modern history period. The movement dates from the beginning of sixteenth century, when Martin Luther first dared the church's authority. Although circumstances that led to his revolutionary attitude had existed for centuries and had complex political, cultural, economic, and doctrinal elements. Martin Luther was trying to tell us of the amount of power the pope possessed over the people. He spoke about the intimidation he has and how he esteems himself as possibly being in a position right below God, and how the people owed him similar respect and reverence. Luther goes on to speak about salvation and faith versus good works.
In that time period, the Catholic Church taught the people that good works, donating money to the church, and self-mutilation among many things were all ways of being saved. This is considered absolutely ridiculous by todays standards. Luther knew this and sought out to expose the truthful way of being saved; through faith. God did not desire for people to live in this manner yet I wonder still how will they be saved if their whole lives were lived blasphemously. The Counter Reformation was led by conservative forces whose aim was both to reform the church and to secure the its traditions against the innovations of Protestant theology and against the more liberalizing effects of the Renaissance. However, one of the most important aspects of the Catholic fight back was the Society of Jesus.
Founded by St. Ignatius Loyola, a Basque ex-soldier, who had met Lutheranism and discovered that he hated it, the Orders founders were gathered by Loyola and made into Loyola's own disciples. Loyola's Spiritual Exercises and Thinking with the Church was books of some power and believed in neither mystic retreat, nor in crazed devotion, but instead in an indifference to the world backed up by knowledge of God and controlled mystic experience. The Reformation was not a foreseeable explosion from a discontented lay society which had long since outgrown the religious forms which the Church purveyed.
On the contrary, by 1500 Europe's people had learned how to choose, select, invest in, and indeed develop the forms of religious piety and reassurance which suited them best. The monopoly held by the Catholic Church was mitigated by the competition for laymen's offerings between different religious orders and different local cults. Undoubtedly, the priesthood was suspected and mistrusted for its extravagance, misuse of resources, and its strivings for political autonomy and influence. This vision of the relationship between the believing community, or the believing soul, and its God should not be dismissed as mere theology, as though it were somehow less real than the nitty-gritty business of class antagonism, economic self-advancement, or political ambition. The ultimate effect of Reformation teaching was an overall cultural shift of fundamental importance for the emergence of the modern world.
It abolished ritual purification through expiatory rituals, the natural source of spiritual comfort for any basically primitive society. In its place it erected a system by which the moral faults and failings, whether of the individual or the community, were first sheltered under the promise of divine grace, and then gradually rectified through instruction and moral discipline. Religious worship served to inculcate correct behavior, not to make up for its absence. It does not matter that the shift of emphasis from ritual to ethical goodness had been anticipated by small cliques of northern Renaissance humanists and their readers. It took the Reformation to turn the ratified scruples of literate intellectuals into a complete pattern of new belief, worship, and Church polity. Social historians commonly point out that the protestant Reformation and the catholic Counter-Reformation sought, at the level of the village community, to Christianize popular culture and behavior in roughly similar ways.
The ultimate social impact of protestant and catholic religious movements was in many ways similar: the clergy were educated, and consciously set apart from the mass of their people; religious dogma was instilled by didactic formulae, including catechisms and the formal rhetoric of the sermon; cults of saints, and external ritual purification in general, were replaced by exhortations to examine the conscience and cultivate moral virtue. How far, then, was the Reformation a 'necessary' or fundamental event in shaping western European culture and society? The experience of catholic countries shows that one could leave the Middle Ages and the popular pre-industrial world by several routes, of which the Reformation was only one. However, those people who had taken the route of public debate and mass involvement would learn by the experience. The Reformation gave large groups of people across Europe their first lessons in political commitment to a universal ideology. In the sixteenth century, religion became mass politics.
Other ideologies, ultimately more secular in tone, would take its place. The Reformation was the first. The Reformation was one of the greatest things that ever happened to both Europe and the rest of the world. The ideas of the Reformation were the foundation of expression of democracy and free speech. The Reformation showed the world that their lives did not have to be run by a religious leader or Monarchist and that a persons life did not have to be centered on religion or the afterlife. If it were not for the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the world we live in now would be a much different place.
The Protestant Reformation was a major building block of modern history. Bibliography: Hodges, Miles H. The Protestant Reformation, 2002. Mullet, Michael A. The Catholic Reformation.
New York: Routledge, 1999. Works of Martin Luther, 6 vol. , Philadelphia ed. 191532, reprinted 1982. McGrath, A. E. , Reformation Thought: An Introduction, Oxford, 1988. Brooks, P.
N. Reformation Principle and Practice: Essays in Honor of Arthur Geoffrey Dickens, London, 1980.
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Research essay sample on Protestant Reformation Counter Reformation
