In all Cultures, Reformation has the same meaning--the bringing back of the religion to the purity of its original idea as this manifested itself in the great centuries of the beginning. In no Culture is this movement missing, whether we know about it, as in the case of Egypt, or not, as in that of China. It means, further, that the city and with it the city-spirit are gradually freeing themselves from the soul of the country-side, setting up in opposition to the latter’s all-power and reconsidering the feelings and thoughts of the primitive pre-urban time with reference to its present self. It was Destiny and not intellectual necessities of thought that led, in the Magian and Faustian worlds, to the budding-off of new religions at this point. We know to-day that, under Charles V, Luther was within an ace of becoming the reformer of the whole undivided Church.

For Luther, like all reformers in all Cultures, was not the first, but _the last of a grand succession_ which led from the great ascetics of the open land to the city-priest. Reformation is _Gothic_, the accomplishment and the testament thereof. Luther’s chorale “_Ein’ feste Burg_” does _not_ belong to the spiritual lyrism of the Baroque. There rumbles in it still the splendid Latin of the _Dies iræ_. It is the Church Militant’s last mighty Satan-song.[515] Luther, like every reformer that had arisen since the year 1000, fought the Church not because it demanded too much, but because it demanded too little. The great stream flows on from Cluny: through Arnold of Brescia, who preached return to Apostolic simplicity and was burned in 1155; through Joachim of Floris, who was the first to use the world “_reformare_;” the spirituals of the Franciscan Order; Jacopone da Todi, revolutionary and singer of the _Stabat Mater_, the knight whom the death of a young wife turned into an ascetic and who tried to overthrow Boniface VIII for governing the Church too slackly; through Wyclif and Hus and Savonarola; to Luther, Karlstadt, Zwingli, Calvin, and--Loyola. The intention of these men, one and all, was not to overcome the Christianity of the Gothic, but to bring it to inward fulfilment. So also with Marcion, Athanasius, the Monophysites, and the Nestorians, who sought in the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon to purify the faith and lead it back to its origins.[516] But so also the Orphics of the Classical seventh century were the last and not the first of a series that must have begun even before 1000 B.C. So with the establishment of the Re religion in Egypt at the close of the Old Kingdom, the Egyptian Gothic. It is an ending, not a new beginning, that these signify. Just so, again, a reform-fulfilment happened in the Vedic religion about the tenth century and was followed by the setting-in of late Brahmanism. And in the ninth century a corresponding epochal point must have occurred in the religious history of China.

However widely the Reformations of the various Cultures may differ amongst themselves, the purpose is the same for all--to bring the faith, which had strayed all too far into the world-as-history and time-secularism (“_Zeitlichkeit_”), back into the realm of Nature, clean waking-consciousness, and pure cause-controlled and cause-pervaded Space; out of the world of economics (“wealth”) into that of science (“poverty”), out of patrician and cavalier society (which was also that of Renaissance and Humanism) into that of spirituals and ascetics; and lastly (as significant as it is impossible) out of the political ambitions of vestmented human thoroughbreds into the realm of holy Causality that is not of this world.

In those times the West--and the situation was the same in the other Cultures--divided the _Corpus Christianorum_ of the population into the three classes of _status policticus, ecclesiasticus, and œconomicus_ (that is, urban), but as the outlook was that of the city and no longer that of the castle and the village, officials and judges belonged to the first-named class, men of learning to the second--and the peasant was forgotten. This is the key to the opposition of the Renaissance and Reformation, which was an opposition of class and not a difference in world-feeling like that of Renaissance and Gothic. Castle-taste and cloister-soul moved into town, and remained there, as before, in opposition--as in Florence the Medici to Savonarola, and as in old Greece the noble families of the cities--with their Homer now finally written down--to the last Orphics--these, too, writers. The Renaissance artists and Humanists are the legitimate successors of the Troubadours and Minnesingers, and just as there is a line from Arnold of Brescia to Luther, so there is a line from Bertrand de Born and Peire Cardinal, through Petrarch, to Ariosto. The castle has become the town-house, the knight the patrician. The whole movement adhered to palaces, as courts; it limits itself to those fields of expression that affect and interest polite society; it is bright and gay, like Homer, because it is courtly--an atmosphere where problems were bad taste, where Dante and Michelangelo cannot but have felt themselves out of place--and it spread over the Alps to the courts of the North, not as a new world-outlook, but as a new taste. The “Northern” Renaissance of the mercantile and capital cities consisted simply in the fact that the _bon ton_ of the Italian patriciate replaced that of the French chivalry.

But the last reformers, too, the Luthers and Savonarolas, were _urban_ monks, and this differentiates them profoundly from the Joachims and the Bernards. Their intellectual and urban askesis is the stepping-stone from the hermitages of quiet valleys to the scholar’s study of the Baroque. The mystic experience of Luther which gave birth to his doctrine of justification is the experience, not of a St. Bernard in the presence of woods and hills and clouds and stars, but of a man who looks through narrow windows on the streets and house walls and gables. Broad God-perfused nature is remote, outside the city wall; and the free intellect, detached from the soil, is inside it. Within the urban, stonewalled waking-consciousness sense and reason part company and become enemies, and the city-mysticism of the last reformers is thus a mysticism of pure reason through and through, and not one of the eye--an illumination of concepts, in presence of which the brightly coloured figures of the old myth fade into paleness.

Necessarily, therefore, it was, in its real depths, a thing of the few. Nothing was left of that sensible content that formerly had offered even to the poorest something to grip. The mighty act of Luther was a purely intellectual decision. Not for nothing has he been regarded as the last great Schoolman of the line of Occam.[517] He completely liberated the Faustian personality--the intermediate person of the priest, which had formerly stood between it and the Infinite, was removed. And now it was wholly alone, self-oriented, its own priest and its own judge. But the common people could only feel, not understand, the element of liberation in it all. They welcomed, enthusiastically, indeed, the tearing-up of visible duties, but they did not come to realize that these had been replaced by intellectual duties that were still stricter. Francis of Assisi had given much and taken little, but the urban Reformation took much and, as far as the majority of people were concerned, gave little.

The holy Causality of the Contrition-sacrament Luther replaced by the mystic experience of inward absolution “by faith alone.” He came very near to Bernard of Clairvaux in this concept of contrition as lifelong, as a continuous intellectual askesis in contrast to the askesis of outward and visible works. Both of them understood absolution as a divine miracle: in so far as the man changes himself, it is God changing him. But what no purely intellectual mysticism can replace is the “Tu” outside, in free nature. The one and the other preached: “Thou must believe that God has forgiven thee,” but for Bernard belief was through the powers of the priest elevated to knowledge, whereas for Luther it sank to doubt and desperate insistence. This little “I,” detached from the cosmos, nailed up in an individual being and (in the most terrific sense of the word) alone, needed the proximity of a powerful “Thou,” and the weaker the intellect, the more urgent the need. Herein lies the ultimate meaning of the Western priest, who from 1215 was elevated above the rest of mankind by the sacrament of ordination and its _character indelebilis_: he was a hand with which even the poorest wretch could grasp God. This _visible_ link with the Infinite, Protestantism destroyed. Strong souls could and did win it back for themselves, but for the weaker it was gradually lost. Bernard, although for him the inward miracle was successful of itself, would not deprive others of the gentler way, for the very illumination of his soul showed him the Mary-world of living nature, all-pervading, ever near, and ever helpful. Luther, who knew himself only and not men, set postulated heroism in place of actual weakness. For him life was desperate battle against the Devil, and that battle he called upon everyone to fight. And everyone who fought it fought alone.

The Reformation abolished the whole bright and consoling side of the Gothic myth--the cult of Mary, the veneration of the saints, the relics, the pilgrimages, the mass. But the myth of devildom and witchcraft remained, for it was the embodiment and cause of the inner torture, and now that torture at last rose to its supreme horror.[518] Baptism was, for Luther at least, an exorcism, the veritable sacrament of devil-banning. There grew up a large, purely Protestant literature about the Devil.[519] Out of the Gothic wealth of colour, there remained black; of its arts, music, in particular organ-music. But in the place of the mythic light-world, whose helpful nearness the faith of the common people could not, after all, forgo, there rose again out of long-buried depths an element of ancient German myth. It came so stealthily that even to-day its true significance is not yet realized. The expressions “folktale” and “popular custom” are inadequate: it is a true Myth that inheres in the firm belief in dwarfs, bogies, nixies, house-sprites, and sweeping clouds of the disembodied, and a true Cult that is seen in the rites, offerings, and conjurings that are still practised with a pious awe. In Germany, at any rate, the Saga took the place, unperceived, of the Mary-myth: Mary was now called Frau Holde, and where once the saints had stood, appeared the faithful Eckart. In the English people what arose was something that has long been designated “Bible-fetishism.”

What Luther lacked--and it is an eternal fatality for Germany--was the eye for facts and the power of practical organization. He did not bring his doctrines to a clear system, nor did he lead the great movement and choose its aim. The one and the other were the work of his great successor Calvin. While the Lutheran movement advanced leaderless in central Europe, he viewed his rule in Geneva as the starting-point of a systematic subjection of the world under a Protestantism unfalteringly thought out to its logical conclusion. Therefore he, and he alone, became a world-power; therefore it was the decisive struggle between the spirit of Calvin and the spirit of Loyola that dominated, from the Spanish Armada on, the world-politics of the Baroque and the struggle for sea-supremacy. While in mid-Europe Reformation and Counter-Reformation struggled for some small imperial city or a few poor Swiss cantons, Canada, the mouth of the Ganges, the Cape, the Mississippi, were the scenes of great decisions fought to an issue by France and Spain, England and Holland. And in these decisions the two grand organizers of the Late religion of the West were ever present, ever opposed.