Introduction
STEWART J.  BROWN AND TIMOTHY TACKETT
Every historical age is an age of transition. But it is clear that from the mid-seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century - the period covered in the present volume - the Christian world would confront a series of exceptionally difficult transformations and challenges. By the end of this period, forces of intellectual and political opposition had arisen that put into question not only the nature of Christian doctrine and the authority of the church - as in the age of the Protestant Reformation - but also the authenticity of the Christian religion itself. Yet the same period also gave birth to a number of movements for religious revitalization and renewal, remarkable for their energy and impact, movements that would arouse major controversies within the established churches. The great wave of revolutions that marked the end of the period would serve to intensify the currents of both religious confrontation and religious renewal.
Here the editors will briefly underline some of the major motifs which emerge from this collective study. After a rapid survey of the geography of Christendom during the early modern period, we will touch on each of the three central themes that serve as the conceptual troika for this volume -Enlightenment, Reawakening, and Revolution. We will argue that those themes did not exist as independent and separate historical strands, but were inextricably interwoven, reacting and interacting with one another throughout the age.
The geography of early modern Christendom
Towards the middle of the seventeenth century, Europe was just emerging from a long series of brutal inter-Christian wars of religion. The basic confessional geography that crystallized by the end of the Thirty Years' War and the civil wars fought in the British Isles persisted with only minor modifications into the twentieth century. The Roman Catholic faith was now
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Predominance
Catholic Anglican I        I Lutheran I Calvinist
Eastern Orthodox Muslim
Complex mixture of religious groups
Map i Confessional map of Europe c. 1700
overwhelmingly dominant across much of southern Europe and the western Mediterranean - including Portugal, Spain, France, and the Italian peninsula -but also in most of Ireland, the Austrian Lowlands, Bavaria, Poland, and Lithuania. The various Protestant denominations, for their part, were deeply entrenched throughout north and north-central Europe, from Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the 'Lutheran sea' of the Baltic - including most of the north German states, Prussia, Scandinavia, Finland, Estonia, and Latvia. Somewhat further south, strong Protestant bridgeheads were also to be found in Silesia, south-west Germany and across the Swiss plateau.
Almost everywhere, of course, there were dissident minorities, clinging to existence within seas of state-supported orthodoxies. But the confessional
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jumble was particularly complex in a central band of territories extending from the United Provinces in the west, across south-central Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, and Transylvania. Here intricate juxtapositions and intermixtures of Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, various Protestant minorities, and Jews, jostled each other in a kind of continuing religious cold war. Further east and south the Catholic and Protestant populations blended into the sphere of the Eastern Orthodox churches, largely dominant in the Russian Empire and the Balkans. But the latter also contained a sizable Muslim minority of Europeans converted during the long occupation by the Ottoman Turks. This was in fact the one area of major religious warfare in Europe after 1648, with Christians and Turks locked in a struggle that continued intermittently to the end of the eighteenth century.
Although Europe remained the heartland of Christendom, home to by far the largest concentration of Christians, the previous period had also seen an unprecedented expansion of Europeans across much of the planet. By the middle of the seventeenth century, Christian missionaries and settlers - sometimes following in the train of warriors and explorers, sometimes advancing on their own - had made contact with all of the major world civilizations.
Throughout large areas of Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America, Spanish and Portuguese mendicants and Jesuits had permanently converted the indigenous populations to the faith. Christianity had also touched wide areas of North America above the Gulf of Mexico. But here in the mid-seventeenth century, European settlements were still relatively sparse, tenaciously clinging to coastlines and river valleys. Compared to the efforts of the Spanish and Portuguese, the Europeans in these areas had been far less successful in converting native peoples.
Much the same could be said for the great expanses of Sub-Saharan Africa. For the most part the European presence consisted of coastal trading stations and a small Dutch colony only just established at the Cape of Good Hope. Yet in two zones - the coasts of Congo and Angola and the lower Zambezi and coastal Mozambique - regulars from Portugal and other nations had succeeded in establishing tenuous Christian communities that survived into the nineteenth century.
In Asia, the small Portuguese province of Goa on the west coast of the Indian subcontinent served as a bridgehead for significant missionary activities throughout south India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), with a few intrepid Jesuits and Capuchins pushing north to the heart of the Mughal Empire and beyond into Nepal and Tibet. Further east, the situation appeared even more hopeful for the Christian mission. The Spanish had won spectacular success in the
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Philippines, permanently converting much of the population within three generations. The Portuguese and the regulars of several other nations had also achieved substantial numbers of baptisms in China, Indochina, Indonesia, and Japan - although much of the progress achieved in the latter region was beginning to crumble by 1650 as the Tokugawa Shogunate launched a broad movement of Christian persecution.
The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were to witness a continuing expansion of Christianity in certain areas of the world. Spain and Portugal pursued their conversions in the Americas, moving into the Californias and parts of Amazonia and Patagonia. In British and French North America, conversions remained relatively limited, although the period saw a huge influx of permanent European settlers, professing a wide variety of Christian denominations and sects. The eighteenth century also marked the advent of the first systematic Protestant missions activity, especially under the influence of the Pietists, who sponsored missionary efforts in North America, Africa, and India. But perhaps the most spectacular new conversions occurred among black African slaves on plantations across the Americas and the Caribbean. Free blacks from the nascent United States would themselves play an important role in proselytizing certain regions of West Africa.
Elsewhere, however, Christian missions experienced major disappointments and setbacks. In the eighteenth century, state-sponsored attacks on the Christian clergy and laity spread from Japan to China, Indochina, Siam, and Korea. Moreover, by the second half of the eighteenth century almost all areas of the world saw a sharp decline in the numbers of missionaries and a general flagging of energy. In part, it was a question of non-western nations coming increasingly to identify Christianity with European political and cultural imperialism. But in part the decline was also related to developments occurring within Europe itself: to the increasing rivalries for empire between European nations; to the pope's rejection of Jesuit efforts to adapt Christian rites to non-European cultures; to the broad attacks on the regular clergy by several European regimes, culminating in the suppression of the Society of Jesus; and to a sharp decrease in recruitment among both regular and secular clergies.
Enlightenment
Many of these developments occurring within Europe can be linked to an array of intellectual trends emerging near the end of the seventeenth century and commonly described as 'the Enlightenment'. This sweeping intellectual movement had varied roots. It was in one sense a reaction to the religious
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warfare that had so devastated Europe up through the mid-seventeenth century and to the politics of intolerance by both Protestant and Catholic states that threatened to revive such warfare: for example, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in France in 1685, or the expulsion of the Protestants from Salzburg in 1730, or the anti-Catholic penal laws in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. Surely some began arguing, it was time to envisage forms of social organization that did not require efforts to impose religious uniformity. The new intellectual trends were also influenced by the growing European exposure to other world religions and cultures through the developing networks of global trade and communication. This exposure promoted among some European thinkers an intense interest in studying other religions - thus, for instance, the so-called British 'Orientalists' in India, who helped to gather and publish the ancient texts of Hinduism. Such studies would lead some European thinkers to a new sense of cultural relativism and a belief that religious systems, even Christianity, were largely human constructs. Perhaps most important, however, was the rise of science, which promoted an alternative means, apart from religious authority, for understanding nature and humanity. Careful observation, mathematical analysis, and logical calculation - the power of reason - would, it was believed, reveal the laws which governed the natural and the social worlds. The experimental method, with experiments that could be repeated by people everywhere, demonstrated sound truths which all rational men and women could accept. Science would show the way to practical improvements in material life, and also to new forms of social organization, based on the natural laws of society and the natural rights of man.
The early proponents of the 'Scientific Revolution were convinced that its teachings provided more potent proofs of the existence of the Christian God and might even help restore the unity of Christendom. The revelations of science, they believed, confirmed the revelations of Scripture, while at the same time ensuring a more rational grounding for the Christian religion, based on the universal laws of nature. This in turn would diminish confessional divisions and strife. The laws of nature and the ethical precepts of Scripture, they insisted, came from the same source - that is, a benevolent God, the creator of a harmonious universe, who intended humankind to live together in charity and mutual respect. Most of those who embraced the ideals of the Enlightenment remained within the Christian tradition, viewing human reason and natural laws as aspects of God's created order, and seeking to bring a more moderate and ethical spirit to Christianity. An example of this Christian moder-atism was William Robertson, Presbyterian clergyman, celebrated historian, Principal of the University of Edinburgh from 1762 to 1793, and acknowledged
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leader of the Church of Scotland, who endeavoured to move that church away from the fierce Calvinism of the seventeenth century towards a rational Christianity emphasizing practical morality and toleration. Such tendencies also had a powerful influence on a generation of European monarchs, who used Enlightened precepts as justifications for exercising an increased control over the churches within their domains. 'Enlightened despots', among them Frederick II of Prussia, Charles III of Spain, and above all Joseph II of Austria, issued sweeping edicts ranging from the imposition of toleration to the reorganization of churches and even the seizure of some ecclesiastical lands and the suppression of certain clerical orders.
While most proponents of the Enlightenment remained within a broadly defined Christian orthodoxy, many were drawn away from a strict dependence upon scriptural revelation to embrace a natural religion, which viewed reason as a sufficient guide to truth. What was the need for scriptural revelation, they asked, if reason and the natural laws revealed the mind of the Creator? Such a path led some to deism, or the belief in a first cause, a divine Creator, who had instilled in humans an innate knowledge of his attributes and the fundamentals of the ethical life. For deists, like John Toland or Voltaire, this innate human knowledge of the godhead lay at the foundation of all the great world religions, and Enlightened men and women could now strip away the accretions and corruptions of the centuries, and embrace the essential truths of God's existence and his moral imperatives. Other Enlightened thinkers, however, went beyond deism to a radical scepticism about the existence of God or of any divinely ordained morality. Such thinkers, to be sure, were a minority, but they included such influential figures as Denis Diderot, the baron d'Holbach and possibly David Hume. In its more extreme expressions the later Enlightenment could be conceived as fundamentally opposed to Christianity and as a precursor of a purely secular world-order.
Reawakening
The late seventeenth century also witnessed the emergence of movements of Christian renewal and reawakening within both the Protestant and Catholic churches. The Protestant reawakening first emerged among certain displaced and dispossessed Protestant communities in central Europe following the devastation of the Thirty Years' War. Some Protestant groups had felt alienated from the religious settlement imposed within their state by the Peace of Westphalia; they found no spiritual home within the church as it was established under the civil law and they felt vulnerable to persecution. In response,
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they developed their own forms of religious expression outside the established order in church and state, emphasizing personal conversion, regular Bible study, the formation of conventicles for prayer and devotion, a strict methodical manner of living, and the practice of charity. Some believed that the millennium was imminent, and they lived in the fervent expectation of Christ's return. These Protestant groups became known as Pietists, and their movement spread, assisted by the printing press, networks of correspondence, the migration of Europeans to the New World, and the missionary zeal of one of their groups, the small colony of Protestant Bohemian refugees that had settled on the Saxon estate of Count Zinzendorf and whose members became known as the Moravian brethren. The Protestant awakening reached Britain, initially Wales, in the 1730s, finding support among labouring men and women who were largely outside the established churches. The emotional itinerant preaching of John Wesley and George Whitefield attracted vast crowds, often in great outdoor meetings, while Wesley organized his converts on the model of continental Pietists into Methodist class meetings. At about the same time, a series of revivals swept through the British colonies in North America, transforming and renewing the religious life in what became known as the Great Awakening.
It was not only the Protestant churches that were affected by a heart-felt and experiential faith. Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, the Roman Catholic Church in France also experienced a movement of spiritual renewal known as Jansenism that had some similarities to the Protestant awakenings. Jansenism emerged largely as a reaction against the triumphalist 'Baroque' orthodoxy of the Catholic Reformation - especially as promoted by the Society of Jesus. Profoundly influenced by the writings of St. Augustine, Jansenists sought to revive an emphasis on predestination and individual conversion through the grace of God, and to cultivate an emotional devotional life. They formed communities of the faithful, practised a rigorous morality, elevated the role of the laity, and engaged in acts of charity. Some strands of Jansenism, especially the more popular 'Convulsionaries' of the early eighteenth century, believed in miraculous healings and felt moved by the Holy Spirit to prophesize. When the Catholic establishment and the Bourbon kings sought to repress the movement, Jansenists became increasingly politicized, intensifying both their anticlerical rhetoric and their opposition to the absolute monarchy. In the course of the eighteenth century, despite the condemnation of some aspects of Jansenism by the papacy, the movement spread among Catholics in the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, and the north of Italy.
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The Christian awakenings were not initially opposed to the contemporary movements of scientific investigation and the Enlightenment, and indeed many of those embracing the new religious zeal also shared in the fervent hopes of social improvement raised by science and reason. The Pietists were strong advocates of both popular and higher education, and the Pietist-dominated University of Halle promoted the study of science, especially the practical applications of scientific learning, and of world cultures. In Britain, John Wesley was a keen student of science and philosophy, and wrote learned treatises on epistemology. The Jansenists included among their number Blaise Pascal, a leading French scientist, who grounded both his scientific and his religious knowledge upon his personal experience. Those influenced by the Enlightenment and those influenced by the Awakening could unite in criticizing the established order in church and state, and in promoting programmes aimed at the extension of education. Protestant Dissenters and philosophers joined forces, moreover, in the first concerted attacks upon the slave trade and the slavery of black Africans. Nonetheless, evangelical Christians strenuously opposed the deism and scepticism that became prevalent in the later Enlightenment, and they grew to abhor the tendency of Enlightened philosophers to promote a moderate, rational, and ethical Christianity, which downplayed the doctrines of human sinfulness, eternal damnation, and Christ's atonement on the cross. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, this distrust had evolved into fundamental opposition.
Revolution
The wave of revolutions that swept across the Atlantic world in the later eighteenth century originated in developments that are largely outside the concern of this volume. In their long-term development, the revolutions can be linked to geopolitical competition for empire and the profits of maritime trade, especially the struggle between Great Britain and France. In the aftermath of Britain's victory in the Seven Years' War, the English-speaking colonies in North America violently resisted efforts by the British parliament to impose greater fiscal and political control over its expanded land empire, and this resistance led between 1775 and 1783 to a declaration of independence, a prolonged war, and the formation of a new republic. The French Revolution began in 1789 as a direct result of the monarchy's efforts to stave off fiscal collapse resulting from a century of imperial conflict, including France's military intervention in the American war. This is not to say, however, that the Enlightenment and Christian Awakenings did not play significant roles in the revolutions. Many
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Enlightened philosophers directed a relentless assault on political institutions that were seen as not reflecting the natural laws and 'inalienable rights' of man, as endowed by the Creator and revealed through reason. Such 'corrupt' political institutions included a distant British monarchy and an imperial parliament imposing taxation on its colonies without due representation, or a divine-right French monarchy granting fiscal privileges to certain social orders or corporate bodies. Moreover, the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s had played an important role in shaping an American identity and a sense of shared destiny under Providence. In France, the Jansenist criticisms of church and state throughout the eighteenth century contributed to the formation of a revolutionary discourse.
Once the revolutions began, they divided Christians. For some Christians, revolution was a rebellion against the divinely ordained order, a revolt, born of sin, against the 'powers that be', the worldly authority provided by God. For others, however, revolution was part of the providential plan for humankind, a movement that promised to strip away corruption and restore both church and state to purer forms; it would end clerical privilege, extend religious toleration, and elevate human aspirations. Many of these Christian supporters welcomed the way in which both the American and French revolutions aroused powerful support to the anti-slavery movement.
While the American Revolution did inspire, in the name of freedom, attacks upon the principle of established churches, it did not bring a break with Christianity. In France, however, the revolution ultimately went much further. After an initial period of support for a reformed Catholic Church within a regime of religious toleration - reforms that led, however, to a schism with Rome -the most radical French revolutionaries turned in 1793 against Christianity itself, portraying it as the ideological prop of the old order and a rallying centre for reaction, which would have to be swept away. To be sure, even the most radical de-Christianizers commonly maintained an attachment to the ethical teachings of Jesus, sometimes portrayed as a 'sans-culottes revolutionary'. Yet at the height of the 'Reign of Terror' they pursued their attacks on all clergy -Catholic and Protestant - and on the physical infrastructure of the church with brutal determination. While the de-Christianization campaign eased in the late 1790s, the churches remained subject to varying degrees of harassment and persecution by revolutionary officials. As the revolutionary and Napoleonic armies advanced beyond the borders of France, moreover, they spread the revolution's anticlerical and even anti-Christian policies to many other parts of Europe. The religious policies of the French Revolution thus stand as a landmark in the history of Christianity.
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The onslaught on Christianity also led to further movements of Christian reawakening in both Protestant and Catholic Europe. These included mil-lenarian movements, as many grew convinced that the political convulsions presaged profound spiritual events, perhaps even the Second Coming of Christ. They also included popular Christian movements of resistance - in Italy, Spain, Russia, and Germany - to what was viewed as a 'godless' French Revolutionary and Napoleonic domination. Among many artists and intellectuals, moreover, there was a celebration of a religion of feeling and a yearning for a restored Christendom. In North America there was a related revival activity known as the Second Great Awakening. The Awakenings contributed to a renewed onslaught on the iniquities of slavery, and to an agreement among the great powers in 1815 to end the slave trade. They also inspired a major increase in Protestant overseas missions activity and a renewal in Catholic overseas missions, laying the foundations for the 'great missionary century' and the renewed spread of Christianity to the wider world.
The plan of the volume
As the reader will discover, the essays in this volume have been divided into five parts. Four chapters in the first part examine the problems of church, state, and society in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. They are conceived to provide a broad overview of the political and social context of the Christian experience during the period. Part II then examines a variety of issues related to Christian life, primarily in Europe, prior to the French Revolution: from the nature and origins of the Catholic and Protestant clergies, to Christian education, sermons and oratory, religious architecture, Christianity and gender, and Christianity and the Jews. In Part III, particular emphasis is placed on the sources of change affecting the Christian world, including both the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment and the various movements of Protestant evangelicalism and Catholic Jansenism. A final chapter in this section explores the currents of toleration and Christian reunion that arose in the eighteenth century before the French Revolution. Part IV takes up the story of Christianity in the non-European world, exploring the advance of Christian settlers and missionaries in five major areas of the planet as well as the general problem of the relations of Christianity with the other major world religions. The final section of the book then picks up three central topics in the Age of Revolution': Christianity as it was involved in the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the movement of opposition to slavery. The ultimate chapter, on Christian reawakenings between 1790 and 1815, provides an overview of
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Christianity in Europe at the end of the period under consideration in this volume.
No collective work of this kind can hope to be entirely inclusive. The reader will find very little here on the immense areas of Australia, New Zealand, and Oceania, where the first Christian settlers and missionaries were only just arriving at the end of our period. Our volume has also not included the various groups within the sphere of the Eastern Orthodox churches which were in communion with the pope in Rome - the so-called 'Uniates' of eastern Europe, and the Maronites and certain elements of the Armenian and Coptic churches in the Middle East. Nor is there a treatment of the role of religion and the clergy in the early nineteenth-century movements of national independence in Iberian America. However, some of these topics will be taken up in the volume on Christianity in the nineteenth century.
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PART I
CHURCH, STATE, AND SOCIETY IN THE EUROPEAN WORLD, 1660-1780
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Continental Catholic Europe
NIGEL ASTON
General trends
The equilibrium sought in church-state relations during the later early modern era was a prize seldom attained. That failure was not a new development. This fundamental relationship in European public life had been contested as long as it had existed: which institution should be supreme in matters of law, appointments, and policy-making? By the mid-seventeenth century, it was obvious that the power of the state was becoming predominant. It was not that the princely houses of Europe were uninterested in promoting the values of Tridentine Catholicism, but they would do it on their terms, at their pace, and rarely unconditionally. The final destruction of Christendom at the Reformation and the persistent Ottoman threat had awarded them a leverage they were never slow to exploit at the expense of the papacy and the episcopate. The defence of the faith was no meaningless task and both sides appreciated well enough that the church militant on earth was dependent on how monarchs chose to understand that phrase. Lutherans had been open about this point since the Reformation and accepted that princely protection compromised institutional independence. Catholic clergy were reluctant to admit that their church was in its way no less reliant on the temporal powers and therefore no less vulnerable to Erastian incursions and policy decisions contrary to their own preferences.
In this period, the church could never assume that rulers would put the interests of Catholicism before the good of their states or the prestige of their dynasty. The Thirty Years' War graphically drove home that lesson. What may have looked like a Catholic reconquista in the 1620s was little more than a struggle for European dominance between France and Spain two decades later, with successive cardinal ministers, Richelieu and Mazarin, unashamedly enlisting heretical help (first the Dutch, then the English) in order to ensure the triumph of'His Most Christian Majesty' of France. In the negotiation of
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the general European settlement at Westphalia in 1648, the Austrian Habs-burgs were also willing to put confessional allegiance aside in the interests of making the empire work, of finally coming to terms with the persistence of Protestantism.
Like it or not, from as early as the mid-seventeenth century, the Catholic Church was obliged by international law to recognize Protestant rights across Germany. Thus, after 1648, non-Catholics at Strasbourg shared the official status of members of the cathedral chapter and Catholics and non-Catholics rotated in the see of Osnabriick. The church honoured the treaty to the letter on the basis of historic concessions capable of legal demonstration, of rights and liberties resting on regional and local differences. The Westphalia provisions also encouraged a form of co-existence with Protestant polities that would later act as a model for tolerating them within Catholic states. Only four years before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, French troops occupied Strasbourg, and the great temple 'so long defiled by Lutheran rites' was reconsecrated. Even Louis XIV was careful, however, to permit Protestant congregations in the city to go on worshipping as before. Nevertheless, in the century after Westphalia, the Catholic hierarchy in Germany was tempted to encroach where it could, so that, as one scholar has put it, 'the bitter Protestant experience was that, as at more exalted levels, the tide went pretty consistently against them'.1
The Catholic hierarchy preferred to think in terms of religious reunion rather than toleration, of absorbing Protestants rather than accommodating them. In the 1680s, Bishop Rojas y Spinola pursued a vision of religious reunion within the empire that was given additional urgency by the need to contain the Turkish challenge. That vision commended itself long after the Ottomans had retreated from the plains of eastern Europe, and was reiterated by Benedict XIV in 1749. Despite (or perhaps because of) the Seven Years' War, inter-confessional relationships flourished in eighteenth-century Germany, with educated Catholics displaying an openness towards Protestants in line with Febronian precepts. Secular rulers were encouraging for a harmonious society made for loyalty and stability, and the Catholic Church went along with the trend in the interests of minimizing any reduction in its confessional privileges.
Outside Germany, the church was slow to make legal allowances for its religious rivals in the absence of any equivalent to the Westphalia stipulations. Intolerance was readily condoned in societies accustomed to considering confessional diversity as tending to political instability. The semblance of religious uniformity also suited rulers keen to show their rivals that their subjects knew that loyalty did not end with secular obligations. Louis XIV's long-premeditated
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revocation of the Edict of Nantes confirmed that the Bourbon monarchy's toleration of the religion pretendue reformee was a tactical gambit rather than a principled commitment.
France reverted to a pattern of official denominational exclusiveness that was very much the European norm in 1700. It tookanother well-publicized measure of anti-Protestant repression, the expulsion of Pietists from the archbishopric of Salzburg in the early 1730s, to bring about a gradual European reaction in favour of toleration. After the Salzburg affair, European advocates of limited toleration were constantly alert to the sort of cause celebre that would call for passionate prose, and they found Enlightened absolutists like Frederick II of Prussia ready to listen on the grounds of state construction. However, less-enlightened rulers long continued to use coercion as a means of obtaining religious uniformity. In Portugal, John V was still persecuting heretics through the Inquisition with fifty-one individuals burnt between 1734 and 1743.
Catholic kings were commonly the combined de facto and de iure heads of their state churches. Indeed, the theology and traditions of the Roman faith were at least as respectful of the deference required for rulers as were any of the Protestant communions. In the post-Tridentine era, absolutist tendencies, the powers vested in bishops for instance, were as fashionable within the church as in the state. Rulers were easily convinced that Catholicism was the natural prop of authority; that Protestantism was born in disobedience with a propensity to republicanism. There was nothing more likely to sanction and uphold royal powers than the Catholic Church, for kingship itself was inconceivable without the blessing of the church. Little wonder that as many as fifty-one German princes converted to Catholicism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even when the Catholic Stuarts lost their throne in England and Scotland in 1688-89 and in Ireland in 1690-91, the church could continue to recognize their family right to appoint to sees in the Irish Catholic bishoprics. This recognition dignified decades of exile, and its withdrawal in 1766 by Clement XIII was a reminder of the supreme legitimating power reposing in the hands of the hierarchy. Though the throne-altar 'alliance' was increasingly weighted in favour of the former, the advantage was not wholly one-way. Churches were highly privileged corporations with rights guaranteed by sovereigns at their coronation, and their leaders took precedence over their counterparts within the nobility.
Of course, though state and church had a clear idea of each other's distinctive roles and of where they could be mutually supportive, there were still frequent conflicts in most decades and in most states about the prerogatives properly belonging to both. By the 1760s, monarchies were adamant that the church
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must accept limits more strictly defined than previously, particularly in matters of taxation. In Milan, where the Giunta Economale (1765) disposed of state powers over the clergy, instructions of 1768 stated: There is no prerogative, no interference of ecclesiastics in the temporal sphere which can be proclaimed as legitimate if it does not originate in the consent and voluntary grant of the sovereign . . .'.2 The anti-Jesuit campaign and the rash of mid-century concordats between princes and the papacy showed that tendency, while later Jansenism encouraged state power as a form of protection for itself, in effect, a variant within the Erastian tradition. In the Austrian Netherlands, the goal was to insert the church into 'the natural order of the state' as Zeger-Bernard van Espen (1646-1728), Professor of Canon Law at Louvain, said. Priests should not forget that they were both subjects and citizens.
The administrative services of the clergy remained at a premium in the running of Catholic states. Monarchs and ministers put a lot of thought into nominating bishops whose political skills were at least as conspicuous as their pastoral ones. At the same time, the fact that promotion was conditional on winning royal favour made bishops and higher clergy as skilled as ever in courtly arts and naturally sympathetic to entrenching regal powers at the expense of papal ones. Any minister expected the co-operation of the episcopate and used the patronage system to make it more likely than not. Thus when Pombal made his first moves against the Jesuits in 1757, he had his brother appointed Inquisitor-General and relied throughout on the compliancy of prelates. In France as elsewhere, bishops were prominent in managing Provincial Estates while cardinals Fleury and Brienne followed the precedent of Richelieu and Mazarin and served in practice as Principal Minister of the realm. Legislative roles were commonplace. In Poland, the seventeen bishops sat in the Senate; the Archbishop-primate of Gniezno was the second dignitary of the commonwealth after the king. In most French parlements a number of magisterial posts (six in Bordeaux, twelve in Paris) were reserved for the clergy. In Spain, Cardinal Portocarrero of Toledo intrigued with some effect in the late 1690s for the accession of the Bourbon dynasty, and as many as nine of the twelve presidents of the Council of Castile in 1700-51 were clerics. Spanish prelates were always caught up in activities that ranged far beyond the pastoral and the charitable. Lorenzana of Toledo tried to revive the decaying silk industry of his seat; Fabian y Fuero of Valencia and Llanes y Argiielles of Seville opened public libraries in their palaces; Bertran of Salamanca founded a vocational school for the training of goldsmiths. The parish clergy, too, were vital spokesmen for, and upholders of, royal authority in their parishes that
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were, after all, the primary agencies of administration across Europe. It was from the pulpits that villagers were likely to learn of royal edicts. Imaginative sovereigns grasped well enough that no agents in their realm possessed a greater reach into the lives and hearts of subjects than the parish clergy. In the church-state disputes of the middle decades of the century, persuading the lower clergy to view public affairs from the crown's perspective became crucial. Hence the interests of Charles III of Spain and Joseph II in securing the 'correct' education of parish priests through seminary consolidation and reform. Where that policy failed to produce results, as it had in the Austrian Netherlands by the late 1780s, the obduracy of the clergy in stirring up the people against imperial plans could be a prime explanation for their failure.
The papacy-Roman Catholicism was, at one level, embodied in an international church with a set of canon laws and observances having ubiquitous application; at another, the irrational structures and working practices of all early modern institutions applied at national, provincial, and local levels. Historical precedents were never lightly set aside and the scope for national churches to nourish and protect their independence from Rome was well rehearsed by the end of the seventeenth century. There had seldom been a point in the history of the papacy when secular rulers had not been assertive in the defence of their own leadership rights in their own states against papal pretensions. If encroachment was possible, then monarchs would attempt it, much as they always had: the process merely accelerated during the eighteenth century.
The Treaty of Westphalia is commonly supposed to have ushered in a period of progressive papal decay culminating in Clement XIV's humiliating consent to dissolve the Society of Jesus in 1773 and Pius VI's ignominious exile from the Holy City twenty-five years later. For Hanns Gross, the Roman see was suffering from 'post-Tridentine syndrome', one denoted by the largely successful completion of the programme laid down nearly two centuries earlier without articulating anything to replace it. This view is not uncontroversial.3 It tends to underestimate the extent to which Tridentine policy initiatives in doctrinal and pastoral matters persisted throughout the eighteenth century. The evolution of the pontifical office during that period drew on a proven capacity for adaptation, suggesting that it was less diminished than different.
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Within Italy, a long-standing leadership role in the city of Rome and the papal states was expanded through the assumption of primatial authority throughout the peninsula. Papal determination to assert metropolitan jurisdiction in the Roman province was underlined by the summoning of a Provincial council to Rome in 1725. In Catholic Europe as a whole, the Holy Father was still honoured as the patriarch of the west, the 'bishop of the universal Church'. He enjoyed continuing rights of ecclesiastical patronage on a scale unknown to any secular ruler even though the exercising of those rights occasionally generated controversy. Thus the refusal to make Alberoni Archbishop of Seville in 1720 blew up a diplomatic crisis with Philip V that resulted in the expulsion of the nuncio. The unwillingness of a pope to recognize a ruler could have lasting repercussions. Neither Innocent X nor Alexander VII would countenance the Braganza claimant, John IV of Portugal (1640-56), nor fill sees with his nominees. John's response was to leave them unfilled, appropriate their incomes, and even contemplate setting up a national church. It was not until Portuguese independence was conceded by Spain in 1668 that the situation was stabilized. Issues such as preferment, regalian rights, clerical immunities and suzerainty over papal fiefs could also provoke conflicts.
In addition, the pope had unique responsibilities in securing the boundaries of Catholic Europe against Muslim encroachment and encouraging Christian monarchs, principally the emperor, to recover lands lost to the infidel. Alexander VII in the 1660s tried to organize a league of European powers against the Ottomans but was thwarted by the minimal help extended by France. Clement X (1670-76) gave financial aid to John Sobieski who defeated the Turks at the Dniester and later led the army that broke the siege of Vienna in 1683. A Holy League was put together by Innocent XI in 1684, consisting of the empire, Venice and Poland, and the pope deployed a military contingent until the close of campaigning in 1687. The results were spectacular: Hungary was liberated in 1686 and Belgrade recovered two years later. Clement XI's preoccupations brought the crusading ideal down into the siecle des lumieres, and the Peace of Passowitz (1718) would be a landmark in the expansion of Christendom. By the 1740s, however, Catholic-Ottoman relations had stabilized much as Catholic-Protestant ones had a century earlier. Benedict XIV enjoyed such amicable diplomatic relations with Othman II that he dubbed him, The Good Turk'. Another aspect of papal pastoral concern was for the Uniate churches of eastern Europe which acknowledged Petrine primacy in general terms. Their vulnerability to Orthodox pressures rose sharply after the first Partition of Poland in 1773 when Catherine II of Russia promised to
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patronize those in White Russia without reference to Rome. Under the circumstances, Clement XIII and Pius VI had no choice but to rely on the good offices of Maria Theresa to support the independence of the Uniates.
A vacancy in St Peter's chair always precipitated a furious level of diplomatic activity as the Catholic powers lobbied to secure their candidate's election, a sign that having the right man in the post could facilitate policy-making appreciably and confer a slight advantage in international relations that was worth a good deal. Failure to obtain the right result could have long-term consequences. Thus Alexander VII (1655-67) could not develop a close working relationship with Mazarin, who had initially worked against his election. It was therefore vital for every Catholic ruler to have cardinals nominated on whose loyalties he could draw at election time. The explicit claims of France and Spain to name 'crown' cardinals had been rejected in 1667, and Benedict XIII met French plans to limit his freedom in creating cardinals by threatening to resign the papacy and retire to his other see of Benevento.
Despite the opportunities it presented, the papal office was a heavy burden, even for the outstandingly able Benedict XIV. Like other supreme pontiffs, Benedict relied heavily on the professional assistance of his secretary of state and those other officers (usually cardinals) holding the post of nuncio in the various Catholic capitals of Europe. The long eighteenth century witnessed the rapid maturation of papal administration. In the half century from Westphalia to the accession of Clement XI in 1700, the traditional role of the cardinal nephew became marginal as part of a steady drive against nepotism. Thus, in 1692 Innocent XII decreed in Romanům decet pontificem that popes could nominate only one kinsman to the cardinalate. There was a corresponding growth in significance of the secretary of state's office. Postings for lengthy periods to a nunciature became normative for senior members of the Curia, and the reports they filed rank as some of the most professional and insightful of their age. Some were outstandingly talented, such as Cardinal Garampi, nuncio to Poland in the aftermath of the first partition, who disarmingly made himself 'the pivot of an international network which set about refuting the policies favouring national churches and their legal rights'.4 Considerable prestige came to be attached to this office, with rulers of the revived and elected monarchies of Portugal and Poland insistent that nuncios to their courts be created cardinals so as to place them on a basis of equality with larger states. It was a sure sign of diplomatic pressures when a nuncio was either expelled or had his office reduced to an ordinary embassy, as occurred in Florence in the 1780s.
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Church and state in France
The Concordat of Bologna (1516) was an established and efficient protocol for the conduct of church-papal relations throughout the period with the Holy Father generally content to confirm royal nominations to dioceses. Failure to do so commonly led to temporary French military occupation of the Avignon and Venaissin enclaves. The Gallican church was, to all intents and purposes, a royal church, the model of a church-state polity to which every lesser Catholic monarch aspired. Despite possessing formidable structures of self-government (the quinquennial General Assembly of the Clergy was the most prestigious) and being exempted from direct taxation (it offered its own 'free gift', set at a rate and incidence of its choosing), the church was a dependent institution that looked to the monarchy for protection. It was not always forthcoming, but the majority of bishops and priests rarely faltered in their loyalty, even when the Gallican Articles of 1682 were discarded in favour of using the pope as an instrument to obtain the royal policy objective of crushing Jansenism. They well knew that the crown controlled senior appointments, and those higher clergy who sought a mitre had to exercise the arts of the courtier. Throughout the fifty-four years of his personal rule, Louis XIV had no regard for any version of Gallicanism that complicated the regalian authority of the sovereign. That stance enabled the King of France to pursue such classically non-Gallican policies as securing and then imposing the papal bull Unigenitus of 1713. After the king's death two years later, the content of Gallicanism would be interminably contested between the canonists and clergy on one side, and the lawyers and magistrates on the other.
Louis XIV's determination to act as the model of a Catholic king was inconsistent and less persuasive than he cared to admit. He was under pressure from the General Assembly of the Clergy to eliminate the legal existence of the Huguenot faith in his realm and the king was sympathetic to this broad objective. Protestants could be conveniently presented as republicans as well as heretics. On the other hand, as recently as 1662 Louis had rewarded Protestant loyalty during the Fronde with a royal declaration confirming the toleration granted at Nantes in 1598. After the Peace of Nijmegen in 1679, Louis backtracked and made it a domestic priority to cancel the Edict of Nantes, and in 1685 the deed was done. The king was acclaimed by a chorus of Gallican bishops with Bossuet of Meaux in the vanguard, but Catholic opinion outside France was either unimpressed or hostile. The vicious campaign of 'persuasion' visited on the Huguenots in the early 1680s was anathema to progressive opinion and reawakened interest in the possibility of toleration as an act of
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state. Leopold I of Austria, the main defender of Christendom against the Turkish threat, was still furious that Louis had sent a derisory French force to join in the relief of Vienna in 1683. Pope Innocent XI remained at loggerheads with Louis over the king's insistence on extending crown rights to draw income from certain vacant bishoprics (the regale) as well as his aggressive policy in the Rhineland and elsewhere on the German frontier. Papal opposition to Louis' candidate for the vacant electoral diocese of Cologne had prompted the occupation of Avignon, the detention of the French nuncio and the king's raising the conciliarist threat. The wrangling got worse before it got better when Innocent in 1687 refused to accept the new French ambassador and, in December 1688, secretly excommunicated Louis and his ministers.
After Innocent's death in 1689, relations between Versailles and Rome slowly improved. Louis was ageing, andhe wanted to enlistpapal support ofhis grandson Anjou to the Spanish succession and, above all, to eliminate Jansenism. There was no necessary reason for Jansenists to constitute a threat to royal power in the 1690s, but the king's insensitive conduct quickly pushed them to adopt the conciliarism that was classically Gallican and at odds with the pro-pontifical policy of convenience that Louis pursued in the quarter century before his death. He was convinced that unless Jansenism was authoritatively and comprehensively condemned before his death it could threaten the continuation of the dynasty that was to be bequeathed to his three-year-old great-grandson. In fact, the king's reckless policy of extracting Unigenitus from a very reluctant Clement XI in 1713 would greatly destabilize French politics after his death.
Cardinal Fleury's long ministry (1726-42) saw a firm, resourceful handling of thejansenist question by one who in his own person embodied the institutional overlap between church and state in eighteenth-century France. Fleury in the 1730s, having declared Unigenitus a law of the French state, relied primarily on patronage to install moderates of his own cast into key vacancies in the church. The policy restored a degree of harmony to church-state relations that lasted beyond his death. But in the 1750s the Archbishop of Paris, Christophe de Beaumont, provoked a constitutional clash with the Paris parlement over Jansenism that had profound implications for the entire polity and damaged the public standing of the First Estate (the clergy). The crown turned out to be an unreliable ally for the majority party in the church. Louis XV was not ready to defend its claims unconditionally and its vulnerability to pressure from anticlericalists in the sovereign courts was apparent to all. Only on the issue of direct taxation had the church been able to preserve its immunities, seeing off the attempt of the Controller-General, Orry to impose the vingtieme
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tax on the clergy in 1749. On that occasion, royal tergiverzation had, for once, worked to the advantage of the clergy.
The expulsion of the Jesuits in 1764 was undeniably a blow to the church, yet it put a term to the First Estate's disputes with the parlementaires and restored a degree of stability to church-state relations, a stability further confirmed by the accession of the pious Louis XVI in 1774. However, the new king was no more inclined to view public affairs from the hierarchy's perspective than his grandfather Louis XV had been. At each General Assembly of the Clergy, the king was abjured to issue an authoritative decree against the flood of impious philosophe or |>hik>so|>he-inspired literature that was said to be corrupting the morals of France. Louis expressed his sympathy but remained inactive. In 1787, to the vexation of the clergy, his government granted very restricted civic rights to Calvinists in France. The edict was disingenuously presented as the working-out of the 1685 Edict of Fontainbleu rather than what it really was, the state sanctioning of a measure of toleration with kingdom-wide validity. With some justification, the clergy as a whole saw it as signalling the start of the dismantling of the French confessional state. They were particularly aghast that it was made law during the ministry of one of their own number: Lomenie de Brienne, Archbishop of Toulouse, who had led 'the opposition' in the first Assembly of Notables (February-June 1787). But if the summons of Brienne to office suggested the continuing importance of the First Estate in affairs of state, the edict of 1787 indicated that a relegation in status of the clergy might not be far off.
Regalist trends in Spain and Portugal
On several occasions in the first half of the seventeenth century, Philip IV and his ministers had been at loggerheads with Rome, but the pressures of war and rebellion had made it impossible to press their points. However, the conferring of the throne of Spain on the Bourbon dynasty in 1700 (confirmed by the Treaty of Utrecht, 1713) signalled the turn towards a more Gallican style of royal control over the church. The post-1700 monarchy negotiated concordats with the papacy in 1737 and 1753, both emphatically confirming royal authority, a tendency known as 'regalism' within a Spanish context. The 1753 concordat was particularly significant: the papacy handed over to the crown the rights of presentation to most benefices, 12,000 in all, leaving only fifty-two in his Holiness's hands. It was also made clear that the crown did not recognize the papal grant of jurisdiction as the necessary foundation of its overseas patronato. It became the norm for clerics to exalt the Bourbon
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monarchy (especially after 1750), often by comparing Charles Ill's rule to the kingship ofDavid and Solomon. The extraction ofpowers comparable to those belonging to their cousin, Louis XV, did nothing to encourage anti-Catholic or anticlerical tendencies in either Ferdinand VI or his half-brother, Charles III. The latter had no interest in either toleration or freedom of expression and in 1761 he triumphantly named Mary of the Immaculate Conception the official patroness of Spain. The Inquisition remained in existence and though a 'sleeping dog', it 'often woke and growled and occasionally bit'.5
After 1753, the crown nominated to the eight archbishoprics and fifty-two bishoprics of the kingdoms through a chamber of the Council of Castile, and involved procedures were put in place to ensure the exclusive selection of men of honour and reputation for episcopal office. These arrangements did not prevent wide suspicion that some ecclesiastical appointments were simonical, though such accusations were always hard to prove. The involvement and cooperation of the episcopate was considered essential to the implementation of the regalist programme and to the introduction of good government and sound religious practices into the bishops' jurisdictions. Thus, in 1767, the Council of Castile sent a circular to the bishops ordering them to curb abuses and superstition in their dioceses. Central administration could be ruthless when episcopal policies seemed at odds with what was sought: as when Jose Climent, Bishop of Barcelona, fell under unjustified suspicion of encouraging separatism in Catalonia and was obliged to resign his see.
The Bourbon crown energized those aspects of the Tridentine agenda neglected by the previous dynasty, particularly the production of an educated parochial clergy. Only eight seminaries were created between 1600 and 1747; but the suppression of the Jesuits added opportunity and urgency to the enterprise and eighteen were established between 1747 and 1797. Their curriculum and organization gave them the semblance of quasi-universities, though many were poorly staffed and too small as viable units. Beyond the crown's complicity in the anti-Jesuit policies of most European Catholic monarchies in the 1760s, there was also a serious effort at introducing state control (at the expense of Rome) over the other religious orders, numerically superior to the parish clergy and not known for their pastoral relevance. In 1776, a national vicar was forced on the Franciscans by the crown, which then extended this innovation to the Trinitarians, Carthusians, and Augustinians in the 1780s. There was, however, an unexpected twist to this imposition of royal authority. Monks and nuns developed the habit of appealing to the Council of Castile for resolution of internal conflicts, so that factionalism actually increased, and the crown's hope of reviving the religious motivations of the regulars was pushed aside.
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In Portugal, the Braganca monarchy was determined that its status vis-a-vis the Holy See should not be less than that of any other Catholic monarchy, and the award of the title 'Most Faithful Majesty' to John V (1706-50) in 1748 gratified him immensely. Relations betweenjohn and the papacy had been constantly fraught over his demand that the office of patriarch of Lisbon (attached to his court chapel at Mafra) should be confirmed. He was ready to break with Rome over this stipulation, and indeed diplomatic relations were severed completely between 1728 and 1732. A concordat finally secured in 1737 brought the office into existence and, by a secret clause, laid down that the holder of the patriarchate would carry assured elevation to the college of cardinals (a point confirmed in 1766). State-church links were consistently tight in Portugal, and under John V the monarchy was happy to spend its wealth for ecclesiastical purposes. Thus Brazilian bullion paid for the great church-monastery of Mafra between 1717 and 1730 as well as church repairs and new buildings in Lisbon after the devastation caused by the earthquake of 1755. With the church a vital part of the national economy, and led by a wealthy, cultivated higher clergy (of 156 bishops in office in 1668-1820 four-fifths belonged to the nobility), the Braganca monarchy could usually rely on the episcopacy for support in any disagreement with the Vatican. Such relations were most valuable to the minister Pombal, who led the way in the Europe-wide campaign to secure the abolition of the Jesuits. The minister's uncompromising stance resulted in the progressive breakdown of diplomatic links with Rome in the 1760s. Pombal also limited clerical privileges generally and transformed the Inquisition into a royal tribunal, though he became in time a figure tending to compromise Portugal's international standing. He was arrested after 1775 and a new concordat was signed with Pius VI. The accession of Maria I in 1777 inaugurated a period of stability in relations between Lisbon and Rome previously unknown in the century.
Italy-Relations between secular rulers and the papacy were nowhere more acute and sensitive than in the Italianpeninsula. The papal states were invaded three times in the course of the century before the French Revolution by foreign armies in the Wars of the Spanish, Polish and Austrian Successions. Even in peace, the Holy See might have to cede ground. In 1731, papal suzerainty over Parma and Piacenza was renounced. A concordat of 1727 with the House of Savoy gave the new Kingdom of Sardinia only a share of the rights it asked for, but a second of 1741 obliged Benedict XIV to permit church appointments in that state to
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be regulated exclusively according to royal preferences. Rights of sanctuary were also virtually abolished, and it was further agreed that the church's property acquired since 1620 should be subject to normal civil taxation. In the Kingdom of Naples, there was a long-standing regalist tradition suspicious of both the Jesuits and the Holy Office, and resentful of the annual tribute of the chinea, the traditional symbol of papal suzererainty over Naples itself. Anti-curial sentiment intensified over papal hesitation at sufficiently recognizing the Bourbon succession in 1734. It ended with a 1741 concordat (there was a second in 1745) and the final abolition of the Holy Office's authority in questions of state. The Bourbon dynasty showed itself unhesitatingly determined to police the church-state boundary lines in its own favour and, over the course of the next half century, diminished rights of sanctuary were established, clergy became liable for taxation, and the principle that only Neapolitans should hold benefices in the kingdom was put beyond dispute. The last symbolic act in this very Catholic form of Erastianism came in 1788 when Ferdinand refused the chinea. A four-year standoff between himself and Pius VI ensued. Eventually, with almost half the sees in southern Italy vacant and the French Revolution demanding his undivided attention, the pope gave way. But the locus classicus of state-sponsored reform Catholicism in the late eighteenth century was the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, a small state of about one million people, run by Maria Theresa's son, Peter Leopold. Catholic reform was not a new current in the duchy but Peter Leopold came to see himself as an 'external bishop' interfering in clerical education and prescribing reading lists almost on the scale of his elder brother, the emperor Joseph II. It was the century's ultimate expression of Caesaropapism, one in which the church seemed programmed for absorption by the state. This was the position in 1780 when the Grand Duke recruited the new Bishop of Pistoia and Prato, Scipione de' Ricci, to be his principal collaborator, the prelate who became known as 'the pope of Tuscany'.
Church and state in Germany and the Habsburg Empire
The pronounced state loyalties of Catholic clergy in most German principalities is well attested, a feature of the political landscape even before the Treaty of Westphalia, and it was nowhere stronger than in the three electoral principalities of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne where state and church alike were governed by their prince-archbishop. The Elector of Mainz, the senior archiepiscopal elector, was also the arch-chancellor ofthe empire, giving him a diplomatic status that far outweighedhis territorial importance. His colleagues
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at Cologne and Trier were scarcely less significant as an international presence, a point that helps to explain Louis XIV's determination to intrude his candidate at Cologne in the mid-i68os, at the height of his own imperial ambitions. As Simon Schama once observed, 'the endurance of Mainz was a witness to the viability of anachronism'6 and successive archbishops behaved confidently as Enlightened absolutists in miniature, ready to take on and overcome the strength of popular, noble, and clerical hostility to change. The greatest of them was Friedrich Karl (1774-1802), who used the demonstratively anti-Austrian and Protestant-dominated Fiirstenbund in 1785 as a springboard for achieving a 'German national church', much to the amusement of Frederick the Great.
Friedrich Karl's success marked the culmination of the development of an essentially German church within Catholicism. Academics at universities like Trier, Mainz, and Wurzburg had been at the fore in this trend, and by the 1730s the scholarship of outstanding historians such as Muratori and the concepts of natural law were used to validate long-standing attacks on targets like annates paid to Rome and papal nuncios. This strand of reasoning was also influenced by Jansenism and by a warmer regard for German Protestantism, as Catholics became accustomed to the confessional co-existence laid down in the 1648 settlements. This pronounced anti-ultramontanism was at its strongest in those principalities where princes looked to academics for theoretical support against the popes and in transforming their territories into sovereign states. Febronianism was the end-product and part of a distinctive Catholic reform movement. Taken together, the ascendancy of such views by the 1760s famously led Heribert Raab to talk of an 'intellectual revolution' in Catholic Germany.
The coming of Febronianism and the apparent confidence of German Protestantism were an imperial policy concern for the Empress Maria Theresa (1740-80). She, no more than her father (Charles VI) or her grandfather (Leopold I), could be viewed as unconditionally responsive to the Curia or to the bishops within the Habsburg territories. She wanted to govern her church while respecting the papacy's spiritual primacy, and guard Catholicism (of which she was, in theory, the leading defender on earth) from further, aggressive Protestant incursions. With her family, she attended Mass daily, as didjoseph II in his ten-year sole reign. The institutional strength of the Austrian church at the turn of the eighteenth century was impressive, though diocesan and provincial boundaries were often awkwardly aligned. The creation of new dioceses in the eighteenth century in the Hereditary Lands was well behind demographic growth: only three episcopal seats were added, although the
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population increased by 50 per cent. Habsburg powers of patronage over a relatively small episcopate were limited. Bishops were elected by cathedral canons in the first instance, according to German custom. Prelates were also well represented in the diets and the clergy furnished up to a quarter of the administrators chosen by these assemblies. The imperial monarchy was determined to reduce the tax immunities of the clergy and achieved this objective at mid-century: after 1749, the regular orders had to pay taxes for a ten-year period and could no longer discuss the amount to be paid annually.
The detachment of the monarchy after mid-century from Jesuit influences was a historic rupture, because Austrian Catholicism had been deeply marked by them. However, the empress was bent on a programme of educational reforms that would increase the role of the secular clergy and the laity. The Habsburg tradition of anti-curialism was reactivated again by Paul Joseph Ritter von Riegger, Professor of Canon Law at Vienna University, drawing on Jansenist-inspired canonists like van Espen, whose own pupil was Febro-nius himself. The latter's ideas were condemned in 1764 by Clement XIII, who feared that the Habsburg monarchy and the German principalities had a common agenda that would end in greatly reducing papal power in central Europe. Maria Theresa was no Febronian, but she pressed on with the policy of secularizing intellectual life in the interests of the monarchy. In 1767, a new administrative department was created to initiate and implement ecclesiastical legislation in the empire. The major participants were her son and co-sovereign, Joseph II, Chancellor Kaunitz, and (from 1769) Franz Joseph Heinke, senior official of ecclesiastical affairs. All were persuaded that state power was fundamental to the task of Catholic reform. Maria Theresa still worried about betraying her family's historic role as the defenders of Catholic culture. In fact, her empire contained a number of non-Catholic minorities, including, in Vienna, an estimated 2,000 Protestants - 1 per cent of the population - and a substantial number of Jews. In the Kingdom of Hungary, the Magyar elite was divided between Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists. Jews also resided in Trieste, Goricia, and Mantua, though community and public worship remained unauthorized there and in both Bohemia and Moravia. In Bohemia, adherence to Protestantism was punishable by death in Charles VI's reign (1711-40), although covert Protestants were tolerated after the annexation of neighbouring Silesia by Prussia in 1745. In 1777, whole Moravian villages declared themselves Protestant, and Kaunitz argued that persecution was inimical both to the interests of true Christianity and to the true interests of the state. But continued disagreement on how to treat religious minorities soured relations between the empress and Joseph II in the 1770s.
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After his mother's death in 1780, Joseph was at last in an unfettered position to introduce a general patent of toleration into the empire and to embark on an unprecedented policy of reforming the church: banning the entry of papal bulls, closing monasteries, rationalizing the organization and number of seminaries to form six general seminaries, with the state assuming the task of educating its parish clergy. The latter would be turned into servants of the state, whatever their personal preferences and irrespective of the provincial privileges which apparently invalidated such centralizingplans. Religion would be the cement of empire, and Jansenist works would be permitted as well as textbooks minimizing papal authority. For Joseph, conversion to Catholicism was in principle desirable but coercion was inadmissible. It was to be a matter of charity and persuasion and he reserved special clerical preferment for those priests who acted according to these guidelines.7
The emperor's controversial agenda had plenty of defenders, especially when Pius VI made his visit to Vienna in 1782 to plead unsuccessfully with the emperor to modify his policies. Was there a danger of a second German Reformation? Pius's anxiety was acute that Joseph's extreme Erastianism was converging with Febronian tendencies in Germany and that his own power-base outside Italy looked close to collapse. Joseph visited Rome in 1783 in a bid to force his claim to appoint all bishops in Milanese territory, a breach of traditional papal prerogatives. Pius tried to save face by making concessions, and a concordat followed in 1784 without fully resolving the jurisdictional dispute. Another bone of contention was Joseph's intent on making his ally Johann Karl von Herberstein Archbishop of Ljubljana, an archdiocese Joseph had created himself. Only the candidate's death in 1787 forestalled outright schism between the emperor and Pius. It was at this middle point of Joseph's reign that opposition began rising over the emperor's ecclesiastical policies. Numerous pamphlets drew attention to the hesitancy and inconsistency in his idiosyncratic approach, such as his refusal to discard clerical celibacy. Confronted with this avalanche of criticism, Joseph brought back censorship and tried to silence the opposition. His heavy-handedness only increased his problems and gave the clergy increased confidence to urge their flocks to resist him. It was a salutary reminder that no eighteenth-century monarch could ever take the good offices of either lower or higher clergy for granted.
The point is well made by Jeremy Black that, 'it is important not to ignore the relationship between "reforming" governments and clerics, and the attempt to adjust the ideologies and practices of Church-State co-operation to new aspirations and circumstances'.8 What is striking in the long eighteenth
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century is less the mutual competition than the capacity of both parties to build on the experience of mutual co-existence over the centuries and the fundamental awareness that each side needed the other. Nowhere was there much sympathy for ultramontane ideals as they would be articulated after 1815. The outreach of papal power may have contracted between 1648 and 1780; yet most of the popes adopted a realpolitik that served the institution well, and they benefitted from the increased professionalization of the advice available to them. The institutional foundations would thus be strong enough to survive the double blow of the dissolution of the Jesuits in 1773 and the French occupation of Rome in 1798. Rome was still capable of acting as the focus of the Christian world, as at the Jubilee of 1750 when St Leonard of Port-Maurice preached the penitential mission before the pope and cardinals and an audience of 100,000 people.
It would be quite misleading to say that it was all downhill for the Catholic Church from the mid-eighteenth century. If Tridentine initiatives were coming to a close, it was because the need for them scarcely existed. They had been completed successfully. Although symptoms of de-Christianization have been detected, Europe was really at its most Christianized, its populations ready to be mobilized against 'Enlightened' opposition to Christianity. One should not forget that, in a moderate form, Catholic opinion had its own Enlightenment imperatives. The increased importance of natural rights and Enlightenment debate shifted consciousness away from the denominational group to the individual believer. Joseph's Edict of Toleration extended newly defined rights from previous areas of denominational co-existence into the areas of Catholic uniformity. But what may be called 'civil rights' still fell short of those awarded Catholic subjects, as the 1787 edict in France indicated. Toleration may have indicated revised limits to confessional churches, it was never intended to cancel their powers and privileges. These still had their uses for any reforming monarch. The real problem for the church between 1750 and 1780 was producing a post-Tridentine agenda and here its imaginative and pastoral failure is evident. Monarchs were not interested in responding to clergy-led initiatives when their own concerns centred primarily on making the church into an efficient unit of state agency. Prelates largely complied because their own ambitions could be gratified by enhanced leadership roles within the polity. For its part, the papacy after Benedict XIV was too preoccupied with dealing with the international crisis caused by demands for the abolition of the Jesuits and its aftermath to have much time for constructing a new strategy for changed times. Church-state relations had become so fraught in the 1760s, so central to the domestic and foreign strategies of most Catholic powers, that
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all sides lost sight of the harm to their credibility that such a war of attrition was likely to cause.
Notes
1. W R. Ward, Christianity under the ancien regime, 1648-1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 5.
2. Quoted in Norbert Jonard, Milan an siecle des Lumieres (Dijon: University of Dijon, 1974), p. 50.
3. Hanns Gross, Romeinthe age of the Enlightenment: Thepost-Tridentinesyndrome andthe ancien regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Cf. the emphasis in Anthony David Wright, The early modern papacy: From the Council of Trent to the French Revolution, 1564-1789 (Harlow: Longman, 2000), especially pp. 7-8. See also Owen Chadwick, The popes and European revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
4. Dries Vanysacker, Cardinal Giuseppe Garampi (1725-92), an Enlightened Ultramontane (Brussels: Brepols, 1995), p. 11.
5. Charles C. Noel, 'Clerics and crown in Bourbon Spain, 1700-1808: Jesuits, Jansenists, and Enlightened reformers', in James E. Bradley and Dale K. Van Kley (eds.), Religion and politics in Enlightened Europe (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), p. 144.
6. See S. Schama's review of T. C. W Blanning, Reform and revolution in Mainz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974) in the Times Literary Supplement (28 March 1975), P- 333-
7. Joseph himself was 'certainly not a Jansenist, but a sort of Christian Stoic': W R. Ward, 'Late Jansenism and the Habsburgs', in Bradley and Van Kley (eds.), Religion andpolitics in Enlightened Europe, p. 180. See Derek Be ales, Joseph II, vol. 1: In the shadow of Maria Theresa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 192, for the emperor's sense of the divine voice speaking within him.
8. Jeremy Black, Eighteenth-century Europe, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1999), p. 241.
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The rise and decline of Pietism
In the period between the end of the Thirty Year's War and the era of the French Revolution, no religious movement changed the face of continental Protestantism more than Pietism. The followers of Pietism, as this religious revival soon came to be called, developed new centres of social, cultural, and political activity for all Protestants. But more importantly, perhaps, those Protestants who were inspired by the ideas of Pietism exhibited a new kind of self-esteem. They believed, it seems, that they were completing whatever had remained unfinished in Luther's Reformation. In short, they saw themselves as a better kind of Protestant.
Philipp Jakob Spener was the undisputed leader of the first generation of Pietists. Born in 1635, Spener received theological training at Strasbourg and rose to the leading position of pastor to the Protestant Church in Frankfurt by the 1660s. Deeply concerned about the sincerity of the members of the flock who were entrusted to him in this thriving centre of international trade, he decided in 1670 to assemble some of the most devout members of his congregation in special meetings. In Spener's view, this first Frankfurt conventicle (or 'ecclesiola in ecclesia') was an attempt to form a kind of Christian elite that in turn would, he hoped, help to better the condition of his congregation and even contribute to reforming the church as a whole. A few years later, in 1675, Spener explained his ideas in some detail in a preface to the new publication of one of the works of Johann Arndt. This preface, soon to be published as a separate tract under the title Pia Desideria, that is, pious wishes', can be considered the founding document of Pietism. It served as the most influential guide for future generations of Pietists. Spener stressed three points in particular in the Pia Desideria. First, he argued, sincere Christians should assemble regularly and support one another spiritually. Second, he insisted that it was the obligation of all devout Christians to help reform the church.
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They should not separate themselves from the church, but try to build a better church. Third, Spener argued, although salvation history had progressed, as all the signs of his time indicated, God had promised to His children before Christ's return a prolonged period in which they could and should build God's kingdom. This hope for better times, as it was called, was a most startling and innovative interpretation of Protestant eschatology. This theological notion meant that all of those who followed the example of Spener were expected to labour most actively in the affairs of this world so that they would, with God's blessing, successfully lay the foundations for His kingdom. Rather than prepare themselves for the Day of the Last Judgement in the fear that this day was imminent, Christians should recognize that God demanded social responsibility and a high standard in the conduct of one's affairs. Through this, Spener redirected the activity particularly of those Protestants who were afraid that they would not gain eternal life. Instead of fearfully observing the signs of the times, he argued, they should initiate and shoulder reform projects that served the good of the church, and indeed the community of all Christians hoping for salvation.
Spener's various initiatives at Frankfurt soon attracted attention. While some of his fellow-pastors applauded what he had done and attempted to proceed in the same manner, others criticized him severely. They argued that by assembling a part of his congregation in a special meeting, Spener was about to divide the church effectively into two camps, those who were brought to believe that they were reborn, and the rest, the so-called children of the world ("Weltkinder'), who were supposedly doomed. Not surprisingly, there were soon also tensions right in the midst of the Frankfurt conventicle. While Spener tried to ensure that the energy of his conventicles would help reform the church, his most important collaborator, the Frankfurt lawyer Johann Jakob Schütz, believed that the church could not be saved and that any efforts in that direction were futile. For Schütz, as salvation history had progressed rapidly, the assembly of those who now met in conventicles was the true church of the end-time.
After long discussions and what was certainly a most painful process, the Frankfurt conventicle split in two. The followers of Schütz met separately, and after some years they decided to migrate to Pennsylvania where they hoped to find a place of refuge as the apocalypse approached. Spener, meanwhile, continued his work for some time in Frankfurt, but in 1686 he decided to accept the position of court preacher in Dresden. Although the Dresden post was considered to be the most prestigious position in Protestant Germany and within Lutheranism, Spener soon found out that he was unable to implement
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any of his proposed reforms in surroundings defined by the luxury of a Baroque court and a prince more interested in operas, fireworks, and hunting than in social reform. Thus in 1692, after only a few years, Spener left Dresden and moved to Berlin, to a somewhat inferior position, but to a court that was open to his ideas. Spener stayed in Berlin until his death in 1705.
In Berlin, Spener became what can be called the patriarch of the Pietist movement. He took an active part in reforming the social system of this socially very diverse city by supporting plans that helped beggars and the very poor, and he used his influence at court and among the high Prussian military officer class to protect Pietists who were persecuted in other territories. Most importantly, however, he counselled literally hundreds of persons who turned to him for help in practical matters and for spiritual advice. Spener answered all of the requests in long and detailed letters that were published even before his death as 'Theologische Bedenken , which means theological considerations or reflections. For historians of Pietism, these 'Theologische Bedenken form a most informative source. Through his answers, Spener was keen to build a network that reached far beyond Berlin and even beyond the Holy Roman Empire. By the end of his life, Spener had developed the two most important means through which Pietists were able to communicate and gain influence: conventicles and letters. Other means of religious socialization, which were soon being exercised effectively, were regular visits of those who considered one another as brothers and sisters in the community of the reborn, meetings of the like-minded, and the establishment of Pietist educational and social institutions. Furthermore, Pietists soon made substantial contributions to the body of edifying tracts and hymns through which they expressed Pietist spirituality. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the new movement had gained many followers all over central Europe and, what was perhaps even more important, an unmistakable profile. In other words, a new tradition had begun. To be considered a Pietist, one had to place the influence of Spener and Johann Arndt next to that of Martin Luther.
Already in the 1680s, pious Protestants met regularly in conventicles in cities like Erfurt, Magdeburg, Lubeck, and Quedlinburg as well as in many other places. Very early on, women participated actively in many of these meetings, while pastors often played only a marginal role. This indicates that these early disciples of Spener were suspicious of the teachings of Lutheran orthodoxy as taught in theological faculties at German universities. At the same time, they were prepared to listen to what they considered direct inspiration and revelation, and such direct revelation could be given, as they believed, to women as
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well as to men. Rather than defer to the authority of the corps of male pastors, they relied on spiritual bonding, on improvised prayers, and on the hope that they would receive direct instruction from God on how to understand certain passages in the Scripture. As might be expected, the ecclesiastical authorities did not take long before they intervened. Wherever conventicles led by lay persons were detected, they were forbidden and dissolved. In many of the Lutheran territories within the Holy Roman Empire, edicts banning Pietist conventicles were passed and executed, sometimes with unnecessary force, by local authorities. But such measures could not stop those who were convinced of Spener's ideas and who felt that they were part of an international religious revival directly guided and inspired by God. That they were persecuted by the official church was, they believed, a sure sign that they were God's elected children. To them, out of repentance for their sins followed rebirth, and out of rebirth the task of sanctification, and out of sanctification the certainty of salvation.
One of Spener's early followers and an active participant in the religious revival of the 1680s was August Hermann Francke, who was a generation younger than Spener. When the church authorities disbanded the conventicles in which he had taken part at Quedlinburg, Francke moved to the city of Halle where he soon made a spectacular career. In his capacity as a talented scholar who was well versed in all of the classical languages, Francke was appointed to a professorship at the newly founded University of Halle. In addition, he became very active in the social field. He founded an orphanage which he expanded into a primary school, to which he added a secondary school, and then a training centre for teachers. But this did not exhaust Francke's remarkable capacities as an organizer. Within only a few years, he founded, in addition to his schools, a pharmacy and also a print-shop in which he printed edifying tracts and bibles which he distributed to the poor. Soon many members of the Prussian aristocracy sent their children to Halle. Alumni of Francke's educational empire found posts as teachers across Europe. As early as 1706, some went as missionaries to India, and this was just the beginning of a wide network of international contacts and connections.
Francke's success would not have been possible without the guiding hand of Spener in Berlin, and certainly not without the special privileges and the protection that he received from the Hohenzollern court. The Hohenzollern dynasty had converted to Calvinism in the early seventeenth century, and they were now ruling a state with a strong Lutheran majority that had close ties to the local estates. In the last decades of the seventeenth century the Hohenzollerns, like the princes of many other territories, attempted to curb
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the influence of the estates in their realm. As the Lutherans supported the estates, the Pietists' wish to establish themselves in the Hohenzollern lands came just at the right time. By helping Spener in his social activities in Berlin, but above all by granting special privileges to Francke at Halle, the Prussian sovereign was able to curtail the influence of the Lutheran establishment and this, as he knew, in turn served to weaken the political role of the estates. It was not love for Pietism that led the Hohenzollerns in their decision to support Halle Pietism; rather, they used the Pietists at Halle for their own political ends.
Francke proved to be more than an equal in dealing with Prussian sovereigns. Francke was committed to building a kingdom of his own, or, rather, one should say, he was convinced that he was the instrument chosen by God to build His kingdom. When Frederick William I became King of Prussia in 1713, he sent an ultimatum to Francke, demanding that he stop his involvement in worldwide projects. Instead, he should concentrate his efforts on helping to improve society and educational provision within Prussia. Francke knew that he had to give in, or at least to give the king the impression that he agreed. In truth, Francke pursued what can be called a double strategy. On the one hand, he sent some of his alumni to teach at the military orphanage in Berlin and he also supplied the Prussian army with military chaplains. Through this and other means he attempted to demonstrate to the king that Halle served the king's policies and nothing else. On the other hand, Francke not only continued to keep contact with Pietists in many other countries, but he actively expanded Halle's sphere of influence. As recent research has clearly shown, Francke corresponded with like-minded Christians in east-central Europe, especially Hungary and Bohemia, and in northern Europe, most notably in Latvia, Lithuania, and Russia. He even sent an expedition to Siberia. Francke also developed close ties to the court in Copenhagen, to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in England and to many of the German communities which had migrated to the British colonies in North America. He also supplied them with bibles and with pharmaceutical products, most notably the essentia dulcis. As a result, between the time of Spener's death in 1705 and Francke's death in 1727, Halle not only was the most important centre of Pietism within Prussia - such that some historians argue that the rise of Prussia and the very special Prussian values can only be understood if one takes into account the influence of Pietism - but also the most active centre of Pietism worldwide. Two centuries after the Reformation, and after a long period of German Lutheran self-centeredness, the Halle Pietists were the first German-speaking Christians to become active outside of Germany
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and contribute significantly to the development of Christianity as a world religion.
The most active and perhaps even the most influential representative of a third generation of Pietists was Ludwig Nikolaus Graf Zinzendorf, born in 1700 and an alumnus of Francke's foundations at Halle. Since the 1720s, Zinzendorf had assembled pious Protestants on his estate at Herrnhut, among them many refugees from Moravia and Bohemia who traced their religious faith back to Johann Hus. In 1727, to the surprise and joy of all who were involved, something that can be called a collective revival occurred at Herrnhut. This event convinced Zinzendorf that God had entrusted to him a very special mission. In the 1730s, the number of Zinzendorf's followers grew rapidly. Pietists from various German regions joined his cause. Soon Herrnhut became too small. Zinzendorf did not hesitate to act. Within the following years, he established new communities in other places, even in other countries, as for example Zeist in the Netherlands, and Neuwied in the Rhineland. Zinzendorf also travelled a great deal. Historians have called him the count who crossed all borders, a characterization that has multiple meanings. Not only did Zinzendorf travel, more than once, to North America where the Herrnhuter, or Moravians as they were called in the English-speaking world, had founded the community of Bethlehem; Zinzendorf also had a close spiritual relationship with common people who counted as his most loyal supporters. For his second marriage he chose a partner from a non-noble family.
As early as the 1730s, Zinzendorf sent missionaries to faraway places. Best known are the missionary endeavours of the Moravians among African slaves on sugar plantations in the West Indies and among the Eskimos in Greenland. As a rule, Zinzendorf's missionaries were skilled artisans, preferably carpenters (although this turned out to be quite useless in Greenland where no trees for building houses could be found). Most certainly, the secret of the success of the missionaries sent from Herrnhut was that they always combined biblical teaching with practical help. Zinzendorf's theology can best be described as an early form of ecumenism. He thought little of confessional differences. Rather, what he attempted to create was an international army of committed reborn Christians of which he would be the undisputed leader. Within Herrnhut, Zinzendorf divided people according to gender, family status and age by forming so-called choirs. In the late 1740s, another wave of spiritual excitement swept through Herrnhut and other Moravian communities. This widely publicized event convinced traditional Protestants and also the Pietists at Halle that Zinzendorf could not be trusted. When Zinzendorf died in 1760, his heritage was as rich as it was problematic. By the time of his death he had
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compiled a huge financial debt. But his legacy was inspiring because he had managed to found the first truly international missionary movement, with outposts on all continents.
The Pietists of Württemberg were among those who had been most reserved, if not unfriendly and at times even hostile, towards Zinzendorf. They had always been closely associated with the estates in their territory, and they remained so throughout the eighteenth century. In fact, one can say that the strict asceticism that Württemberg Pietists espoused formed the basis of the political opposition of the Württemberg estates in their struggle with the prince who strove, like most other German princes of the time, to rule in an absolutist manner and to imitate the life of the court at Versailles. At the same time, Württemberg Pietists were not very active in the social field. While they concentrated on spiritual edification and personal sanctification, and while they strengthened family ties and local networks, their primary aim was not to create new institutions or to send out missionaries. Those young men from Württemberg who wanted to become missionaries went to Herrnhut.
What made Württemberg Pietists special was their strong interest in escha-tology and in the apocalypse, and the person who gained most influence and scholarly authority in this respect was Johann Albrecht Bengel. By carefully assembling all numbers that he could find in the Old and New Testaments and in particular in the Revelation of St John, and by combining these numbers in what he believed to be a meaningful way so that they would disclose the hidden chronology of salvation history, Bengel concluded that the exact date of the Second Coming would be June 1836, and the place, of course, Jerusalem. Bengel was convinced that God had revealed this insight to him so that he could admonish His most loyal children to prepare themselves for this most crucial event. Bengel died in 1752. Even after they had lost their spiritual leader, the Pietists of Württemberg never forgot that the world-order in which they lived and which presented them with so many hardships would be totally transformed in the not too distant future. In the 1790s, as the sequence of upheavals caused by the French Revolution unfolded, Württemberg Pietists were convinced that this was the beginning of the final raging of the devil that preceded Christ's return. As we will see in the final chapter of this volume, some of them decided to migrate to Palestine where they hoped to find a safe place of refuge until 1836 and the Second Coming.
In assessing the impact of Pietism on continental Protestantism, the year 1740 formed a watershed. Before 1740, the movement was growing, especially due to the favours that Halle received from the Prussian king and also because of the attraction of Zinzendorf s initiatives. When Frederick the Great assumed
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power in Berlin in 1740, things changed drastically. The new King of Prussia was a fervent believer in the ideas of the Enlightenment. He despised the kind of piety that Halle propagated and did not hesitate to make his thoughts on the matter clear. In 1723, due to pressure from Francke, Frederick William I had decided to ban the Enlightened philosopher Christian Wolff from Halle University. In 1740, one of the first actions of his son, Frederick the Great, was to reinstall Wolff in his chair at Halle. To Halle Pietists and beyond, this was an unmistakable signal that the time in which they had enjoyed the protection of the Berlin court was over.
Zinzendorf s movement was also affected by the beginning of the first of the Silesian Wars. Perhaps it is not sheer speculation to assume that Zinzendorf s strong interest in Pennsylvania in the 1740s was due to his impression that with Frederick the Great's assumption of the throne, central Europe was lost to the followers of true faith and that God's remaining children needed an alternative place to live and labour until Christ returned. Perhaps, at least in part, the same conviction can also be found among Halle Pietists. This would explain why the followers of Halle and Herrnhut bitterly confronted each other in Pennsylvania in the 1740s and in the 1750s, as each group attempted to gain influence and control.
Eighteenth-century continental Protestantism between orthodoxy and nonconformity
Important as Pietism was within continental Protestantism in the first half of the eighteenth century, it would be misleading to create the impression that Pietists completely dominated Protestant church life during this period. Resistance to Pietism has been mentioned, and most of this resistance was formulated and pursued by other Protestants, orthodox Lutherans and traditional Calvinists alike. Protestant orthodoxy possessed and maintained three main spheres of influence well into the eighteenth century: first, theological faculties at leading universities; second, the large body of clergy including most church leaders; third, most members of territorial governments and local administrations. In other words, in most Protestant territories well into the eighteenth century the rule of territorial princes over the church (the 'Landes-herrliche Kirchenregiment') was intact and functioning effectively. Just as they were expected to provide loyal legal experts for the government, universities had the obligation to educate pastors who would be loyal to the government. In all universities an impressive body of orthodox theological literature was available that could be put to use in the academic training of future pastors.
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Protestant clergymen, in turn, were expected to represent church and state on the local level. Pastors were responsible for the proper administration of marriages, baptisms, funerals, and, of course, Sunday services. But above and beyond this they had to see that the local order was not interrupted and that those who disturbed others, on workdays as well as Sundays, were brought to justice. In many places pastors served also as teachers; some gave medical advice and, when needed, also medical help. Everywhere, the duties of pastors were far more extensive than preaching the pure faith. In fact, one can say that Sunday services were the least important of their duties and functions. When lay people formed conventicles without the consent and approval of the pastor, he had the duty to interfere. When groups of radical dissenters appeared in villages or cities, the pastors were expected to act. In short, pastors were the extended arm of territorial governments, and just as most members of territorial governments clung to traditional orthodox belief, so did many pastors. There were, of course, many pastors who were not content to hold to traditional orthodoxy or to act as government functionaries. Some of these pastors, as we have seen, were drawn to Pietism. Others, however, were attracted by the ideas of the early Enlightenment. Indeed, by the 1730s and certainly by the 1740s, the number of pastors who embraced Enlightenment thought was larger than the number of those who favoured Pietism or the number of those who still clung to orthodox doctrine.
Further, in certain regions Protestant radicalism in the tradition of the radical reformation played a much greater role than either Pietism or orthodoxy. Typically, these were regions in which some of the lesser princes reigned in a patriarchal manner, that is, in parts of the Palatinate, of Hesse, of Thuringia, and in some areas on the lower Rhine. In most instances, these radicals were inspired by eschatology. As the apocalypse was near, their leaders proclaimed, the remaining true children of God had to separate from the official and established churches that had fallen, as they thought, into the hands of the devil. These radicals held, wherever possible, separate services and practised communion without the assistance of the local pastor. In the tradition of sixteenth-century Anabaptists they often insisted upon adult baptism. Lay preaching was the rule as was the belief that God's word in the Bible could best be understood by those who were not corrupted by learned theology. From the late seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth century, self-appointed itinerant preachers travelled over the German countryside. Often they were persecuted and driven out of the villages and towns that they visited. But to the degree they suffered humiliation, they gained authority in the eyes of people in search of the divine truth. For many decades, for example, the
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former tanner Johann Friedrich Rock travelled through southern Germany. Protestant dissenters venerated him as a prophet and saint.
Almost all local governments considered Protestant separatists a serious political danger. Leaders of such groups were put into prison, and all means available were used to break up regional networks of separatists and to discourage these nonconformist faithful. From the 1680s onwards, and especially between 1700 and 1730, but again also in the 1750s, as they were confronted with mistrust and repression, many groups of Protestant dissenters decided to leave Germany. While some migrated to Transylvania, most went to the British colonies in North America, and especially to Pennsylvania. Whether Germany's loss was America's gain in this matter depends on one's view of the role of the church and on how religious life should develop. If one believes that church ordinances should be obeyed under all circumstances and that any kind of dissent only serves to disrupt the spiritual growth of congregations, one can approve the actions of those pastors who did not tolerate dissent. However, if one acknowledges the importance of every person's individual conscience and concludes that religious liberty is an essential ingredient for the building of God's kingdom, then he or she must believe that the Protestant state officials and Protestant pastors failed in their Christian vocation when they suppressed nonconformists and expelled dissenters. In any event, by getting rid of separatists and dissenters, German Protestantism, both Lutheran and Calvinist, lost a vital religious element that might have led to a situation in which religion could prosper exactly because it was no longer expected first and foremost to serve political ends.
The consolidation of Protestant states in post-1648 central Europe
The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 confirmed the Treaty of Augsburg of 1555, with some important modifications. In addition to territories ruled by Catholic princes or prince-bishops, and territories ruled by Lutheran princes, Calvinist princes were now also accepted as equals within the legal framework of the Holy Roman Empire. The Lutheran and Calvinist princes were also the official heads of the churches in their states. In most Lutheran and Calvinist territories within the empire, church government was entrusted to consistories. Superintendents were in charge of supervising deans who in turn were obliged to control church life down to the parish level in villages and towns. The consistories were also in charge of organizing the education of future pastors; they had to control the way active pastors fulfilled their duties; they were responsible
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for administering church finances and church property. In short, they were not only representatives of the prince in his position as the head of the church, but they were also empowered to enforce the edicts concerning church doctrine and church life that the prince wanted to put into effect. In some Lutheran states church affairs were run by bishops, as for example in Sweden, where the church was headed by the Archbishop of Uppsala. In regard to practical matters of church life as well as the preservation and defence of Lutheran or Calvinist doctrine, only small differences existed between Protestant churches under the leadership of bishops and those run by consistories. In both cases, the princes attempted to incorporate the churches into the emerging bureaucracy of their absolutist rule and, to varying degrees, were successful in doing so. Only in a small number of Protestant states in central Europe did estates continue to exert some power in church matters. Within the empire, the Mecklenburg duchies and the Duchy of Württemberg were such cases. Outside the empire, this was true of some Calvinist provinces of Hungary that were, as we shall see, under continued Catholic pressure, as well as the Protestant cantons of the Swiss federation.
Within the Protestant states of central Europe, the backbone of the established churches was the support first by the ruling princes and then, especially in towns, by the families that belonged to the well-educated middle classes. By contrast, noble families very often took pride in their legal autonomy as well as in their social distinction and cherished their own confessional tradition, which might be different from the established tradition within the state. In the decades after 1648, moreover, it took a long time before confessional indoctrination made any significant impact among members of the lower classes. As servants of artisans or farmers the lower classes adhered, as a rule, to the faith practised by their masters. When they had the opportunity to migrate to other regions in search of a better life, or when they were forced to migrate, they often showed little confessional loyalty. Even among artisans there are examples of people who changed their confessional affiliation several times.
But there were also spectacular examples of confessional loyalty. The Huguenots who decided to leave France in 1685 rather than convert to Catholicism formed close confessional communities and congregations in the states that offered them places of refuge. They were led by Reformed pastors who in turn were supported by a large number of well-educated merchants and artisans. In their host societies they managed to create communities adhering to the Reformed faith which remained loyal to the religious tradition of their heroic forefathers well into the nineteenth century. The Waldensians who were forced to emigrate only a few years after the Huguenots also showed
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a remarkable degree of religious loyalty to their special tradition. They, too, continued to preserve their Waldensian faith in the places that were offered to them as new settlements. Even the Salzburgers who were expelled by an intransigent Catholic archbishop in the early 1730s and had to leave their native Alpine valleys retained their confessional identity for several generations. As they migrated to faraway places, some to East Prussia, others as far as the new British colony of Georgia, they were praised by their fellow Protestants as heroes of true Protestant faith. In the territories in which they were able to settle they received, in most cases, special privileges, including the right to practise their faith. As a result, they were able to celebrate the memory of their special religious destiny.
The privileges granted to Huguenots, Waldensians, and Salzburgers should not be considered an expression of religious tolerance on the part of the host princes, however. The Huguenots, for example, were famous as extremely talented and productive artisans, and the Lutheran princes were pursuing their own economic interests when they permitted the Huguenots to settle in their territories and retain their own Reformed traditions. The princes' position was marked by economic pragmatism, as dictated by the theories of mercantilism, not by a deliberate policy of toleration. Nor were those princes who granted refuge to the Salzburgers inspired by Enlightened ideas of religious toleration. As they paid tribute to the fame the Salzburgers had gained on their journey through the empire, they attempted to stylize themselves as champions of true Protestant faith. Even in Prussia, a policy of religious toleration came later.
The principle of 'cuius regio ejus religio', first proclaimed in 1555 and confirmed in 1648, was put to a severe test in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries when several Protestant princes decided to convert to Catholicism. The most spectacular case occurred in 1697 when the Elector of Saxony had the opportunity to become King of Poland on condition that he convert to Catholicism, which he did. And there were also other, similar cases. In 1733, for example, a Catholic prince inherited the Lutheran Duchy of Württemberg. Since the early Reformation of the sixteenth century, both Saxony and Württemberg had been first among the defenders of Lutheran faith. What could be done in Saxony and Württemberg to honour this tradition if their prince was a Catholic? How could the confessional balance of power in the Holy Roman Empire be preserved if leading princes changed confessional sides? In both cases the estates successfully claimed the right to protect Lutheranism and to be responsible for the course of church government. Through this compromise, the delicate relationship between Protestant and Catholic powers within the empire could be maintained.
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But there were also political events that threatened the confessional balance within the European concert of powers. In the decades after 1648, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 had severely hurt the position of Protestantism in western Europe. In a similar manner, the Habsburgs set out to strengthen Catholicism in east-central Europe. After they had consolidated the rule of the Catholic Church in Bohemia, they reclaimed, step by step, the Alpine provinces for the Catholic religion. By 1700, after the Turks had been defeated and large parts of the Balkans were opened to Habsburg influence, the Habsburgs' main aim was to support the Counter-Reformation in the Kingdom of Hungary. Once again, the leaders of Hungarian Calvinism were determined to resist. In the early seventeenth century, Count Gabor Bethlen and Duke George Räkoczi had led, though unsuccessfully, many of their Calvinist countrymen in an uprising against the Habsburg policy of Counter-Reformation, and now, in 1703, so did Duke Francis Räkoczi. By 1711, Vienna had succeeded in suppressing the opposition, bringing continued misery to the Protestants in Hungary. Their situation improved somewhat three decades later as Empress Maria Theresa showed a certain degree of respect for Hungarian Protestants. But it was not until 1782, that is two years after she had passed away, that her son, Emperor Joseph II pronounced his famous Toleration Edict that provided for confessional autonomy within the Habsburg Empire, including confessional autonomy for Hungarian Protestants.
The Habsburg Counter-Reformation was no less aggressive in Silesia. After 1648, with the exception of two small duchies and the city of Breslau, freedom of religion was no longer granted to Silesian Lutherans. While three so-called peace churches (Friedenskirchen) were entrusted to them, a total of over 1,200 Protestant churches were reclaimed for Catholic worship and incorporated into Catholic congregations. In the following decades, some 200,000 Silesian Lutherans decided to emigrate. Many others remained and attended secret Lutheran services in the woods (Buschkirchen), and some Lutherans regularly travelled long distances to attend services across the border in a neighbouring Lutheran territory. Help came late, and unexpectedly, from a power that had rescued Protestantism in central Europe before. In 1707, the Swedish king Charles XII, backed by a strong army, forced Emperor Joseph I to sign the convention of Altranstädt. This treaty guaranteed the return to Lutherans of 130 formerly Protestant churches that had been expropriated in Silesia and the establishment of an additional six new churches (so-called Gnadenkirchen). Also, schools for Protestants were reopened. Through these measures, Protestantism in Silesia was saved several decades before Frederick the Great annexed Silesia in 1740. It is also important to note that the Habsburg
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Counter-Reformation not only produced mass emigration and widespread despair in Silesia but, in opposition to Catholic Vienna, also an impressively rich Silesian literary culture. Of the many Silesian poets of the pre-1740 era, perhaps Andreas Gryphius was the most talented.
As these examples demonstrate, the consolidation of Protestantism in central Europe was challenged by a series of attempts to continue the Counter-Reformation even after the peace treaty of Westphalia. At the same time, however, we should note that Protestantism blossomed in some states of Europe that had, each in a different manner, a strong influence on confessional matters in the region. With the support of absolutism, Lutheranism in both Sweden and Denmark developed a strong tradition that was not weakened as Pietism replaced Lutheran orthodoxy. But there were also other ways of influencing Protestantism in central Europe. In close relation, not to absolutist princes, but to the estates, Protestantism became a strong force in the Netherlands. On the other hand, the Protestant cantons of Switzerland had to fight several battles before they were able to defend their confessional autonomy. Perhaps nothing inspired Protestants on the European continent more than the success of Puritanism in England. English Puritanism provided a rich source of edifying literature. In most cases, these books were brought to central Europe via the Netherlands. Puritanism also served as an example that Protestantism could be successfully defended in the arena of power-politics.
The consolidation of Protestant states in post-1648 Europe should be seen, therefore, as a process that occurred on two levels - the level of European politics and the level of popular religion. First, at the level of European politics, the rise of the Protestant powers helped to stabilize Protestantism as a whole. In direct and indirect ways, both Sweden and Denmark continued after 1648 to provide protection to Protestantism in central Europe, and so did the Netherlands, though mainly as an economic power and as a centre of culture. After 1689, Great Britain became the premier Protestant power in Europe, joined, a few decades later, by the new Kingdom of Prussia. By 1700, and certainly by 1740, we can therefore observe a kind of double confessional balance of power in Europe: first, and most notably, within the Holy Roman Empire; but also among the leading powers of Europe, whose influence helped to reinforce the first. Second, under the protection of the Protestant powers and when no longer threatened by the forces of the Counter-Reformation, Protestantism was consolidated at the level of popular religion. During the first half of the eighteenth century, Protestantism became an undisputed way of life for people in many parts of central Europe. So much so, that when the
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Archbishop of Salzburg decided to expel the Protestants from his territory in the early 1730s, most Europeans considered such behaviour to be anachronistic.
The aims and the attraction of the Enlightenment
The new ideas of the Enlightenment first captured the minds of Protestants in the north west of Europe, in Great Britain and the Netherlands. While British and Dutch thinkers made bold moves towards a new world-view, their counterparts in German Protestantism were, as a rule, more cautious, if not timid when it came to expressing new ideas. This was true, for example, of the political writings of the German Protestant, Samuel Pufendorf, as well as of the philosophical treatises of his fellow German, Christian Thomasius. Both lacked the vision and the determination of such Scottish or English authors as David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, or John Locke. And the same was equally true of the writings of such early eighteenth-century German Protestant theologians asjohann Franz Buddeus, Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, Johann Georg Walch, Christoph Matthaeus Pfaff, and Johann August Ernesti. Their writings appear like cautious adjustments to new ideas when compared to the works on Deism by British and Irish authors like Anthony Collins, John Toland, William Whiston, Thomas Woolston, or Matthew Tindal. During his lifetime, Baruch Spinoza, writing in the Netherlands, had no influence in Germany. Not until almost a hundred years after his death in 1677 were his ideas discussed or greatly appreciated. The books of Pierre Bayle and of Christian Wolff had an impact on German intellectual life somewhat earlier, but not before the middle of the eighteenth century. Even the celebrated German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz received little attention from his contemporaries. Only in retrospect have the quality of his philosophical reflections and his contribution to paving the way towards an Enlightened theological discourse found the necessary attention and received their due praise.
What has to be stressed once again is the importance of the caesura of 1740. The Enlightenment had little impact in Protestant Germany before Frederick the Great became king. The Enlightenment then gained momentum between 1740 and the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763. In the years between 1763 and the beginning of the French Revolution, the public sphere, including the theological faculties of the German universities, became dominated by the themes that were central to the Enlightenment. It was in this period that Lessing published some of the texts on biblical criticism written by Hermann Samuel Reimarus, that Johannes Joachim Spalding explained the principles of Enlightened thought in his writings, that August Friedrich Wilhelm Sack and
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Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Jerusalem began to discuss central topics of Christian theology in a critical manner, and that Christoph Friedrich Nicolai applied literary criticism to biblical texts. It was in the two decades before the fall of the Bastille that Johann Salomo Semler, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Immanuel Kant in their writings discussed and fully developed the programme of the Enlightenment. Religious and theological tradition, these writers insisted, had to stand the test of reason ('Vernunft'); further, Christianity had to adhere to the principle of tolerance. For Lessing, the ideas of Moses Mendelssohn were more important and inspiring than Protestant tradition. For Kant, criticism based on reason outweighed dogma.
To be sure, the programme of Enlightenment had two faces. One face was characterized by the application of the principles of rationalism and criticism. The other face was determined by the implementation of practical reforms in many spheres oflife. One can even say that while the impact ofbiblical criticism within German Protestantism always remained limited to a relatively small circle of university theologians, it was these practical reforms which changed German Protestantism fundamentally and which helped to create and shape a new generation of Protestant clergy who understood their task in a new way. At least in the beginning, Pietists supported many of the Enlightened reforms wholeheartedly. In Halle, for example, Christian Thomasius stood behind the educational initiatives of August Hermann Francke. But while Pietists and Enlightened circles could co-operate in carrying through practical reforms, they parted ways when it came to matters of eschatology and Christology and most certainly when Enlightened thinkers addressed questions ofbiblical criticism. Very often, and in many places, however, this was not the case before the middle of the eighteenth century. What we can observe, at least for some decades, are local coalitions between single members of both reform movements that were designed to carry through specific projects.
Enlightenment reforms mainly addressed six different spheres of German life. First, for the early Enlightenment as well as for the Enlightenment in the second half of the eighteenth century, the improvement of education was a central goal. Education meant that children should attend school regularly and learn how to write and read. Education also meant that people should learn the fundamentals of personal hygiene, that if illness occurred, they should consult a doctor and apply the right kind of medicine. In short, people were themselves responsible for their lives and should use the intellectual capabilities entrusted to them by God in order to improve their personal condition as well as the condition of their families and the communities in which they lived. It went without saying that curricula in secondary schools as well as academic
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teaching should be improved. New universities were established which were completely devoted to the programme of the Enlightenment, such as the University of Gottingen.
Second, for the Enlightenment, useful knowledge was no longer found only in traditional religious texts or in edifying literature. Rather, supporters of the Enlightenment produced and propagated an impressive amount of new and highly specialized literature. Many of these texts possessed a practical dimension. Such literature could address medical problems, matters of agriculture, legal reform and the like. Besides, Enlightened thinkers thought that educated people should take an interest in poetry, novels, and the theatre. While up until the early eighteenth century most texts published in Protestant Germany had been devoted to religious and theological themes, by 1750 such matters were discussed in less than 20 per cent of all publications.
Third, for many people, the legal reforms that were demanded by Enlightened writers were of more importance than anything else. In addition to the application of due legal procedures these legal reforms addressed major questions such as capital punishment or how one should deal with infanticide. Following the great Italian reformer Cesare Beccaria, German legal experts also demanded the abolition of torture as well as the abolition of capital punishment. While up until then women who had been found guilty of infanticide could not expect any mercy, the discussion now turned to the question of the guilt of those men who had seduced young women, while these women were given advice, counselling, and practical help. Furthermore, in its extreme form, the Enlightenment did not tolerate any kind of superstition. The witchcraft trials of the seventeenth century were looked upon with contempt and horror. Hence, even before 1789 many popular myths and legends were demystified. What we find particularly in Protestant Germany towards the end of the eighteenth century, therefore, is a fascinating vision of a just and tolerant society based on the rational application of law.
Fourth, Enlightened writers insisted that the reform programme should also include agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce. In these areas the Enlightenment introduced an interest in inventions and the practical application of new techniques. A telling example in this respect was the severe hunger crisis of 1770-72 caused by harvest failure in two consecutive years. In previous years of severe shortage, for example in the 1570s and in the 1690s, all commentators had implored their fellow-citizens to stop sinning, to repent and live once again the lives of good Christians so that God would cease punishing them and show mercy. In 1770-72, by contrast, the majority of those who wrote about the crisis demanded that their contemporaries use the power of
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reason given to them by God more effectively than in the past. They should introduce crop rotations, build better storage facilities for food, use fertilizer and better seeds. In short, the crisis, they believed, could have been avoided if the Enlightened programme for improvements in the field of agriculture had been implemented.
Fifth, those inspired by the Enlightenment took a new interest in the cultures outside of Europe. While the Pietists sent missionaries to foreign lands, Enlightened scientists attempted to explore and describe societies in Asia and Africa, particularly in non-Christian countries like Iran, India, China, and Japan. They looked at these cultures not as the missionaries did, that is as heathens who needed nothing more than the light of the gospel, but with the eyes of ethnologists. In the belief that all cultures and all peoples were equal, as explained by Johann Gottfried Herder, they tried to learn. European imperialism and colonialism came later.
Sixth and finally, a special concern of committed members of the Enlightened elite was the toleration of Jews. Well into the eighteenth century Jews in Germany were barely tolerated. In order to secure residence, they had to pay extra fees, without ever reaching a state of civil acceptance. This was so when the Enlightened elite began to demand the complete equality of all members of all religions, including the Jews. Major steps in this direction were first made by Emperor Joseph II of Austria. Other sovereigns, including Frederick the Great, followed his example. At the time of the outbreak of the French Revolution, Jewish citizens of many towns had been given a more secure status, but popular hostility, both in the Catholic as well as in the Protestant parts of Germany, persisted. Many Protestants, and especially those who felt attached to the cause of mission, propagated the idea that the conversion of all Jews to Christianity (the 'Judenmission') would be the solution to the problem. It was still a long way before the vision of a multi-faith Germany that would include all the various forms of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews would be realized. By 1789, the programme of religious tolerance so eloquently and impressively spelled out by Lessing in his Nathan der Weise was far from being accepted as a way of life.
As can be imagined, it took an enormous effort before such a comprehensive and challenging agenda as the one proposed by the representatives of the Enlightenment could be implemented, even if only in part. When the French Revolution totally changed European affairs, much had not been completed. As many observers of the events in France came to believe that the radical Enlightenment was to blame for the sudden upheaval of the old order, it became much harder to carry through reforms based on Enlightened ideas
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after 1789. The backlash began even before the Enlightened offensive had been successful.
Enlightened despotism as a form of secularization
At best, Enlightened despots ruling in the various Protestant states of central Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century advocated religious tolerance; very often, however, they had no interest in religion other than as a matter of traditional decorum on certain holidays and on special occasions. For example, Enlightened despots ordered that burial grounds which up until then had often been placed in churchyards located in town centres should be closed for hygienic reasons, and that new cemeteries should be opened outside of towns and villages. Sacred ground mattered little to them. Sacred objects they valued as art forms. Just as many Catholic rulers of the time dissolved the monasteries of those orders that did not provide useful services to society, for many Protestant rulers pastors were only helpful and necessary as long as they told people to live an orderly life, to work hard, and to obey the authorities. More often than not the Enlightened despots lacked respect for religion, or any substantial emotional tie to religion. It is not wrong, therefore, to view the rule of the Protestant Enlightened despots as a major step towards secularization. Had these rulers opened the door for a gradual separation of state and church, and had they extended effective political support to religious minorities, absolute rule combined with Enlightened insight might have served, at least temporarily, a useful function. But as these rulers insisted both on absolute obedience in political matters and on imposing their authority over church life, their regimes challenged the sanctity of individual conscience in a manner that contradicted their Enlightened precepts, and that resulted in regimes that could not be upheld for very long.
Before new forms of political rule had been established, opposition, particularly in Protestant regions of Germany, against the church policy of Enlightened despots began to grow. As early as 1780 a Society of Defenders of True Christianity (the 'Christentumsgesellschaft') was founded. Within a decade, branch societies had sprung up in many parts of central Europe. At first, the members of these societies published tracts in which they disputed Enlightened views on theology. After a few years, however, and especially from the early 1790s, they actively opposed Enlightened church policies. For example, when Protestant consistories introduced new hymnals or new liturgies that followed Enlightenment principles, the societies organized local resistance. Furthermore, they provided support when a missionary society was founded
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in Basel and when, a few years later, Bible societies were created in a number of German cities. In both of these cases, important outside support had come from anti-revolutionary Protestant circles in Great Britain. The members of the 'Christentumsgesellschaft' saw themselves as fighting for a common cause, and also to be within the tradition of Pietism. Most certainly, these groups opposing Enlightened despotism represented the beginning of a religious revival within continental Protestantism that lasted well into the nineteenth century and which embodied the 'Erweckungsbewegung, that is, the German Protestant equivalent to the Second Great Awakening in North America or the Reveil in Protestant French-speaking Switzerland. After the Napoleonic Wars were over, in most Protestant territories of Germany a compromise had to be found between the remaining representatives of the Enlightenment, the new followers of Pietism, and some circles for whom, in the turmoil of the times, Protestant orthodoxy had assumed an unexpected attraction. In the course of the nineteenth century, this compromise was challenged by liberalism and socialism and, above all, by German nationalism which had erupted in unexpected ways for the first time in the fight against Napoleon in 1813.
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The state church ideal
The civil wars fought within the British Isles from the Scottish 'Bishops' Wars' of 1638-39 into the 1650s were essentially wars of religion, often initiated as bids for control of national churches. Almost allparties to these conflicts had initially held the rightness of a homogeneous, authoritative church congruent with the polity; what distinguished the participants were their goals for that united body. Yet the realities of conflict splintered this ideal: in the 1640s the 'plural society' triumphed as each man did what was right in his own eyes. This teeming, passionate sectarianism meant that at the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 a revived state church was the least likely of political possibilities. Yet the ideal of a national church was first reinstituted, and then enjoyed a hegemonic position into the 1820s.
This was especially so in England. The idea of an 'Ecclesia Angličana' had a millennium of varied development behind it by 1660; the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563 had drawn upon older assumptions in referring without explication to 'Every particular or National Church' (Article 34). The sense in which the church in England was regarded as the Church of England was strengthened but not invented in the 1530s and 1550s. The mutually supporting relation between the secular and the sacred was a high ideal as well as a set of administrative procedures, and a legitimate role for the Christian prince in governing the church was conventionally traced back to Constantine. In 1660, each of the component territories of a restored composite monarchy sought to apply a still-powerful ideal. England, Scotland, and Ireland all had their national churches, and each shared a vision of a homogeneous Christian society that the status of these churches expressed.
William Warburton echoed a truism of his age when he argued that 'wherever there are diversities of religion, each sect, believing its own the true, strives to advance itself on the ruins of the rest . . . What persecutions, rebellions,
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revolutions, loss of civil and religious liberty, these intestine struggles between sects have occasioned, is well known even to such as are least acquainted with the history of mankind . . . the obvious remedy was to establish one church, and give a free toleration to the rest.'1 This ideal would continue to dominate the relations of church and state; in 1780, a state church was still the norm, powerfully entrenched and defended with much sophistication.
In 1785, even the latitudinarian William Paley could advance an analysis of establishment as if it were uncontroversial:
The notion of a religious establishment comprehends three things; - a clergy, or an order of men secluded from other professions to attend upon the offices of religion; - a legal provision for the maintenance of the clergy; - and the confining of that provision to the teachers of a particular sect of Christianity.2
Yet this was a minimalist doctrine. More was involved when, in 1660, one alternative - episcopal Anglicanism - emerged as dominant. William Sancroft, later Archbishop of Canterbury, implored God that He would 'digest that Chaos, and Confusion, and Strife of Opinions into one beautifull, and Harmonious Composure'.3 This was not to be: the triumph of episcopacy henceforth defined the separated alternatives as 'denominations'. Each denomination possessed a set of teachings on ecclesiology or ecclesiastical polity that justified its claims on the basis of scriptural history, revelation, or natural law. These teachings continued to compete, especially during the periodc. 1660-1725: this was the era in which the challenge of Protestant and Roman Catholic Dissent generated the most powerful Anglican responses.
The 'established church' was a term whose meaning nevertheless differed across the monarchy's possessions. In Wales, it might appear as the church associated with the union of 1536, like the system of shires andJPs. In Scotland, a Presbyterian polity was enforced after the Revolution of 1688. The Church of Ireland could be seen as the church of the English ascendancy, imposed in different ways by Henry VIII, Elizabeth, Cromwell, and William III. In England the church had never been established in this politically proactive sense, never chosen from among competing alternatives. An established church, in this English perspective, was strengthened, not founded, by its relations with the state. In this English sense, Samuel Johnson defined 'establishment' in his Dictionary of 1755 as 'Confirmation of something already done; ratification'. The church was also 'an establishment' in the sense that it was served by an elaborately endowed hierarchy of archbishops, bishops, deans, and archdeacons, and vouched for by the endowed universities and grammar schools; it performed acts of charity through endowed hospitals, orphanages, and
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asylums, was supported by tithes which it claimed by divine right, and collected them with the assistance of the civil power. For Low Churchmen like Gilbert Burnet, by contrast, it was not the church as such but 'the Protestant religion that had been 'established'.4 Yet neither Luther nor Calvin was to provide the rationale for England's state church; this became the achievement of English divines and lawyers.
The nature of the English church
The Restoration in 1660 did not follow a Laudian blueprint, but it was primarily High Churchmen who exploited Laud's legacy in order to shape a reinsti-tuted regime: royal supremacy, episcopacy, the threefold ministry of bishops, priests and deacons, church courts, and liturgical uniformity. They coupled this ecclesiastical polity with a High Church ecclesiology: their keynote was the church's hierocratic nature. Sancroft, preaching at the great restocking of episcopal ranks in 1660, did not defend the relation of the church to the state, but rather promoted the church itself as an ecclesiastical polity whose form and authority derived from the Apostles. Besides that momentous theme, the exact nature of the church's connection with the state was not his priority, as long as the state accorded it protection.5
An episcopal regime in which the church claimed an independent source of authority was potentially a challenge to the monarchy as well as a support to it. It was therefore necessary to argue that episcopacy might be by divine right in the weaker sense of copying Christ's or the Apostles' example or institution, rather than in the sense of obeying an express divine command. Coercive jurisdiction derived from the crown alone. Papists, Presbyterians, and Independents challenged the king's supremacy, but not episcopalians.6 This explanatory formula did not prevent their collision, and the resistance of the church helped to bring down a Catholic sovereign in 1688. The general claim of this church to the support of the civil magistrate was not that it was merely the church chosen for pragmatic reasons by the state but that it embodied religious truth. William Lloyd, later a bishop, argued in this sense of the term 'established', defending first the church's Apostolic status and its doctrine; then condemning the errors of Rome; and only then offering as a motive for supporting it 'the Safety of the King's Person, and the Prerogative of the Crown .. . according to the powers invested in the Jewish Kings under the Law, and exercised by the first Christian Emperours'.7
In England, the nature of the church and its link to the state was continually debated. In the absence of statutory definitions, individual churchmen offered
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views that sometimes came to carry semi-official status; the most famous was Richard Hooker (c. 1554-1600). When the eight books of his Laws ofEcclesiastical Polity were first printed together in 1662, edited for anti-Laudian ends by the new Bishop of Exeter, John Gauden, Book VII's endorsement of episcopacy in other than divine right terms and Book VIII's constitutional restrictions on monarchy were embarrassments. Hooker's work was therefore republished in 1666 on the instructions of Archbishop Gilbert Sheldon, this version re-edited by Isaak Walton, prefaced by a new life of Hooker and containing prominent editorial doubts as to the authenticity of the last three books. Hooker himself had looked charitably on non-episcopal churches and had not denied the validity of their orders, but his work could now be read as that of a Caroline High Churchman, insisting that civil and ecclesiastical authority were linked because they were equally communicated by divine appointment. After the Restoration Hooker enjoyed his greatest vogue, hailed by churchmen as an antidote to the new phenomenon of separated denominations of Protestant Dissenters on the strength of his demolition of the old Puritan claim to a right of private judgement.
To justify the role of the prince in non-Roman churches, Hooker had implicitly ignored the Apostolic succession and argued instead that Truth of Religion is the proper difference whereby a Church is distinguished from other Politique societies of men'. If the church was not separately grounded on its Apostolicity it could follow that church and state were the same: 'We hold that seeing there is not any man of the Church of England but the same man is also a member of the Common-wealth; not any, member of the Common-wealth, which is not also of the Church of England', whether one called the body a church or a commonwealth was determined by 'chance'.8 Having made that anti-papal point, Hooker had then said little about the rest of the issues that were later to be subsumed under the question of'establishment'. Others now did so for him.
A High Church ecclesiology was clearly defined between about 1660 and 1725 by the need to respond to two powerful threats: Protestant and Roman Catholic Dissent. The first of these was the major challenge in the 1660s and 1670s, in the aftermath of the sectarianism of the interregnum. Simon Patrick, later Bishop of Ely, provided one among many critiques of schism that identified the key points at issue: private conscience, unlicensed ministry, extemporary prayer and pretences to personal revelation. Against them he advanced a defence of Apostolical ordinations and the lawfulness of the official regulation of things indifferent.9 Archbishop Sheldon's chaplain, Samuel Parker, later Bishop of Oxford, provided an influential restatement, commissioned by Sheldon, of
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the 'Unanswerable' Hooker, but without Hooker's constitutional limitations on the crown. The point was now to use Hooker to resist the new phenomenon of separated Dissent and to insist on the Christian duty of obedience in place of Dissent's appeal to private judgement. For Parker, it was enough that the Church of England's 'Forms and Institutions are not only countenanced by the best and purest times of Christianity, but establisht by the Fundamental Laws of the Land', since 'the Supreme Magistrate of every Common-wealth should be vested with a Power to govern and conduct the Consciences of Subjects in Affairs of Religion'.10
The second challenge, that of Roman Catholic Dissent, came to prominence from the 1670s with the conversion to Catholicism of the heir presumptive, James, Duke of York. The response to this challenge produced not only the definition of a new secular political ideology, Whiggism, but also a remarkable outpouring of Anglican ecclesiological and theological writing dedicated to rebutting the claims of Rome. In the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81, produced by a Whig attempt to bar James from the succession, churchmen defended the monarchy without giving prominence to the idea of establishment. Rather, they claimed that the Church of England 'dothhold, teach, and practice Loyalty above all others in the World; the Divines thereof generally holding Monarchy to be of Divine Right', by contrast with the Roman Church, which held that kings derived their authority from the people and were open to being censured or deposed by the pope. This political stance followed from the fact that 'The present Religion of the Church of England is no new device of ours, but the very same that our Lord Jesus and his Apostles have left upon Record'. Religious truth was the yardstick: As for the penalties inflicted on Dissenters by our Laws, they are rather for disturbing the Peace of the Civil Government, than for differing from us in Judgment'.11
In 1707 the Whig High Churchman John Potter provided the classic summation of this ecclesiology. Still aimed equally against Rome and Geneva, it professed to vindicate both the 'inherent Rights' of the Church of England since the Reformation and the 'just Prerogative' of the civil magistrate on the basis of the 'Constitution, Government and Rights of the Christian Church' as established by the Scriptures and the Fathers. It was a work intended 'towards the putting a Stop to those Erastian and other licentious Principles, which are too rife, and have been too much countenanc'd by some among us'. Potter argued that the church possessed only spiritual powers; nevertheless, the church was 'not a mere voluntary Society, but one whereof Men are oblig'd to be Members' since 'this Society is appointed with an inforcement of Rewards and Punishments'. It was governed after Christ's death by 'a Succession of the
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same Officers in the following Ages' to the world's end, the orders of ministers like their powers being by divine commission. 'To continue this Account after the Church was taken into the Protection of the Civil Powers, to vindicate the Supremacy of Christian Princes, and to adjust it with the Rights of the Church', Potter recognized, 'will require another Book'. This he never completed, becoming instead Bishop of Oxford in 1715 and Archbishop of Canterbury in I737-12
It remained for another Whig High Churchman, Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London from 1723 to 1748, to give the lasting legal interpretation of the relation of the church, as conceived by Potter, to the state. Gibson's Codex, published in two folio volumes in 1713 and reprinted in 1761, was recognized as the definitive compendium on canon law. Gibson insisted both on the union of church and state, and also on the church's separate authority. From a detailed historical survey, he argued that the documents defining the church's relation to the state acknowledged the church's spiritual independence. Statutes were generally only 'Enforcements of the ancient Ecclesiastical Laws' designed to strengthen them 'in the same Chanel', not to be replacements of them. Bishops therefore exercised 'Government and Disciplin' upon 'the foot of Divine, as well as Human, Authority'. The church was not, therefore, 'a meer Creature of the State'. But this was not a preliminary to an alliance, since the Christian prince's supremacy in the state and the church gave the two an inseparable unity.13 The jurist Sir Edward Coke, argued Gibson, had been wrong to claim that only the clergy, and not the laity, would be bound by legislation passed by Convocation (the provincial assembly of the clergy) but not by parliament. It was this High Church vision that was made problematic, but not necessarily refuted, by the suspension of Convocation in 1717.
A similar but importantly modified position was expressed by the lawyer Thomas Wood in a standard compendium of 1720. 'Law in General' was built most notably on 'the Law of Nature' (commonly called 'the Law of Reason), and 'the Revealed Law of God: Hence it is that our Law punishes Blasphemies, Perjuries &c. and receives the Canons of the Church duly made, and sup-poseth a Spiritual Jurisdiction and Authority in the Church'. Wood gave a careful account of the mutual roles of ecclesiastical and civil courts: both were subject to the royal supremacy, and there was in Wood's account no evident clash of jurisdictions. For Wood, however, 'the Legislative Power in the Church, and the Canons that are made concerning the Church with the Royal Assent bind the Clergy, but not the Laity'.14 So it was for a churchman and lawyer like Richard Burn, who by 1763 explicitly accepted the doctrine of the common lawyers in Cox's case (1700) and Middleton v. Croft (1736)
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that The canons of a convocation do not bind the laity without an act of parliament'.15
If lawyers almost always reiterated Wood's position, clergymen were prominent in questioning Gibson's. Benjamin Hoadly and his allies sought to guard against the threat of a Catholic Stuart restoration by countering a High Church ecclesiology with Low Church minimalism. Hoadly was only the most notorious among the Whig clergy who seized the common ground of the legitimate role of the state in regulating the church, but he used it to vilify both the Nonjurors and High Church theology: the political acceptability of the first critique shielded him from the consequences of attacking the second.
Hoadly insisted that the Nonjurors' target was nothing less than the principle of established religion: The Establishment is now openly and directly charged with the Want of all Right'. But it was a valid establishment, replied Hoadly, despite the Revolution of 1688, since God had not instituted 'a Regular Uninterrupted Succession either of bishops orofmonarchs. Instead, every man's Title to God's favour cannot depend upon his actual being, or continuing, in any particular Method; but upon his Real sincerity in the conduct of his Conscience, and of His own Actions, under it. . . The Favour of God, therefore, follows Sincerity, consider'd as such'.16 Hoadly's Erastianism in ecclesiology was reflected in his theology: unfettered private judgement was the essence of Christianity; no church could claim to exercise a direct divine mandate. Christ
hath, in those Points, left behind Him, no visible, humane Authority; no Vicegerents, who can be said properly to supply his Place; no Interpreters, upon whom his Subjects are absolutely to depend; no Judges over the Consciences or Religion of His people . . . All his Subjects are equally his Subjects; and, as such, equally without Authority to alter, to add to, or to interpret, his Laws so, as to claim the absolute Submission of Others to such Interpretation.17
The majority of churchmen who agreed with Hoadly's arguments on the legitimacy of the Revolution nonetheless reviled these theological arguments. Whig politicians, however, were more often in sympathy with Hoadly's theology, since they rightly interpreted the church's claims to civil authority, claims which they emphatically rejected, as rooted in the belief that the church carried a direct divine commission. The early years of the Whig ascendancy saw a series of parliamentary attempts to repeal legislation that churchmen held to be integral to 'the establishment'. Part was repealed, but part survived. Walpole finally backed away from extending 'the Toleration' at the expense of 'the Establishment' in the face of an unprecedented storm. The 'Bangorian Controversy' was an outcry against the minimalist interpretation
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of Christianity held by Hoadly then bishop of Bangor. Although triggered by the political aspect of Hoadly's teaching, the controversy came to centre on the spiritual authority of the church. Hoadly's most effective opponent was a Nonjuror, William Law.18 He appealed to an understanding of the English church as it had been defined by the sixteenth-century reformers, with its claim to spiritual authority resting on the evidences of Christ, the Apostles, the Fathers, and the Councils. This was to be a generally prevalent argument in the latter part of the century.
In the 1660s, the church had seen itself as being assailed from both Geneva and Rome. By the 1730s, it was becoming evident that both challenges had been beaten off: the church would retain the position which had been defined for it by law. The High Church party, meanwhile, suffered a major defeat. In emphasizing the divine mandate for the church, High Churchmen had sometimes ascribed separate authority to the church's legislature. Hooker had not defined the relation between Convocation and parliament, and this relationship remained uncertain after 1660. Convocation surrendered the right to set clerical taxation in 1664, and was rewarded by not being summoned between 1664 and 1688. It met again in 1689, but there was increasing controversy over its role. The 'Convocation Controversy' was fought on political grounds after William III once more prorogued that body in 1689.19 Convocation's chief champion became Francis Atterbury from 1713 Bishop of Rochester, a juror but also a Jacobite; the leading champions on the other side were Edmund Gibson, bishop of Lincoln from 1716, and William Wake, from 1716 Archbishop of Canterbury. Hoadly now became the last straw. His theological heterodoxy was a challenge that Convocation could not avoid, and Convocation's evident intention to discipline him raised the stakes. The Whig regime took pre-emptive action. After several turbulent annual sessions Convocation was suspended in 1717. With Convocation's suspension it became necessary to treat parliament, however implausibly, as the lay synod of the Church of England.
A principled defence of establishment, in deliberately Whiggish language, was now provided by William Warburton. Yet Warburton was in his own day not widely credited with having provided the church's official rationale. This is because Hooker's model of the essential unity of church and state, as reinterpreted from the 1660s, precluded Warburton's model of a contract between two essentially separate bodies, church and state. Anglican doctrine asserting the essential unity of the secular and the sacred had been fully formed by 1713. Warburton's tract of 1736 was one of few in the later period centrally to address the question of church-state relations, because the issue could be regarded as having been settled in the era of Potter and Gibson. In this light,
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people tended to see Warburton's theory as a route to a shared conclusion. The underpinnings of Warburton's position were also revealed in his reply to Bolingbroke in 1766. Only Christian doctrine was God given, he argued. 'Church-government', on the other hand, 'may be administered by an Episcopacy, a Presbytery, or an Independency', since its 'specific form' was 'not prescribed'. On the contrary, Jesus had left it 'to particular churches to follow such as were most agreeable to the forms of those civil societies, in which they were to be established'.20 Warburton's view, however, was not shared by most mid- and late eighteenth-century churchmen.
If Warburton in the 1730s expressed the idea of establishment in the language of natural law and contract, Paley in the 1780s equally captured the idiom of his day when he expressed a similar idea in the language of utility. On the surface, both Warburton and Paley denied that the civil magistrate had any concern with the truth status of religion. Warburton presented his key defence of the establishment as not truth, but utility.21 Read more closely, however, even Warburton and Paley ultimately grounded the claims of the church on the truth of its doctrine. Warburton argued that the state would ally with the larger church in the realm as that best 'enabled ... to answer the ends of an alliance', but only 'where there is an equality in other points'. In the first edition of 1736, the key qualification was '(where the difference [between churches] is not in Essentials)': clearly the Church of England claimed its foundation on natural law. Warburton also included in a footnote a strongly positive commendation of the church: 'I would recommend that excellent Treatise intit[uled] A Vindication of the Corporation and Test Acts'.22 But Thomas Sherlock's tract of 1718 had, as a premise, truth as the basis of the church's authority.23 Although Warburton later omitted this argument, he continued to include his closing claim that the alliance 'secures . . . the advancement of truth'.24
In his bestselfing work of 1785, William Paley, atleast on the surface, adopted a similar argument: 'The authority ... of a church establishment is founded in its utility'. This position was not an anticipation of the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, but rather a latitudinarian belief (like Warburton's) that no form of church government was prescribed in Scripture. Paley did not, however, claim that no theology whatever was there authoritatively set out. His other latitudinarian premise was that 'In religion, as in other subjects, truth, if left to itself, will almost always gain the ascendancy'. It followed that 'of different systems of faith, that is the best, which is the truest . . . we are justified in pronouncing the true religion, by its very truth, and independently of all considerations of tendencies, aptness, or any other internal
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qualities whatever, to be universally the best'. Consequently, even 'The justice and expediency of toleration we found principally in its conduciveness to truth'.25
Hoadly and Warburton failed to destroy a High Church rationale for establishment. This was also shown by the rapidly acclaimed Commentaries of William Blackstone, who treated Christianity as integral to civil society.26 For Blackstone, the value of the Church of England was grounded in the truth of its doctrines, combined with its resistance to the threat posed to the state by Dissenters.27 Consequently, the civil magistrate 'is bound indeed to protect the established church, by admitting none but it's genuine members to offices of trust and emolument: for, if every sect was to be indulged in a free communion of civil employments, the idea of a national establishment would be at once destroyed, and the episcopal church would no longer be the church of England'.
Blackstone pointed to 'two bulwarks', the Corporation and Test Acts, 'which secure both our civil and religious liberties', but he offered no deeper reflection on the sense in which the church was 'established'.28 The old commonlaw doctrine that 'Christianity is part of the laws of England', repeated by Blackstone,29 was still relied on by judges into the early nineteenth century in cases of blasphemous libel. Not only did Blackstone pour scorn on the Whig contractarian account of the origin of the state,30 but his account of the history of the church left no room for a contract either: the origins of its established status were implicitly revealed in his chapter on the clergy, for Blackstone there traced their 'large privileges' back before Charlemagne, beyond any demonstrable moment of alliance between church and state.31
The argument for practical advantages of an established church was strong into the early nineteenth century. But from the 1760s a rival strand was reasserted in Anglican ecclesiology that criticized the Hoadly-Warburton-Paley tradition and identified it as a falling away from High Church ecclesiology. Represented by George Home, William Jones of Nayland, Samuel Horsley and Charles Daubeny this tradition offered various readings of divine-right monarchy and episcopacy: it portrayed the church as part of the origins of the state, by divine institution. For them, Scripture provided the texts for an account of a Providential, not a contractual, social order.
This reassertion of a Catholic ecclesiology led by 1815 to a defence of the establishment, despite the fact that the church's 'high and transcendent claims' were 'not of a temporal nature', and that the church's position as 'a National Establishment' meant only state provision for its worship and state protection against other denominations, not a right to coerce the laity. Thus a reasserted
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claim of the church's Apostolical authority (a 'far higher character than that of an establishment') could be a route to a pragmatic defence of its established status, in which the civil magistrate supported the establishment only 'to keep alive a sense of religion, with a view to the well-being of society'. The magistrate's choice of which church to support was not, however, exactly unconstrained, since in this account only one church could claim Apostolical authority: 'Every other association, assuming the name of a Church, must. . . be a mere human institution'. Only a difference on an essential matter of faith could justify separation: 'when an Established Church is, in its constitution, an Apostolical Church, such a difference alone can justify separation from that Church'.32 It was this rationale, at once utilitarian and Catholic, that underpinned the last flowering of the state church ideal in the years 1808-28. Disestablishment as an ideal waited for the formation of the 'Liberation Society' in 1844.
Ireland
The Church of Ireland, too, was a 'national' church - albeit one which paradoxically antedated its 'nation' and which was continually debating issues of continuity. The Church of Ireland had, like the Church of England, been subjected to reorganization by sixteenth-century legislation. Its members had a similar monopoly of political office after the test law of 1704; its archbishops and bishops sat in the Irish House of Lords, participating in state ceremonial and offering an endorsement of the political order. Its clergy, too, unavailingly sought to voice their views in a Convocation which enjoyed meetings only between 1703 and 1714 and which was resisted by Irish Protestant MPs; despite Convocation's general abeyance, the network of church courts continued to function. The Irish church, like the English, was bitterly divided on political lines after 1688, the Whigs denouncing their Tory and High Church opponents as standing for the independence of the church from the civil power, the Tories denigrating Whig landowners for being irreligious as well as anticlerical, and Low Church clergy for being Erastian or latitudinarian. From this system no fundamental reform of church finances, pluralism, or patronage was to emerge. The preoccupations of the Church of Ireland were too often with political threats to its very survival.
The political events of the seventeenth century served to place emphasis on the premise that Catholics, if given power, would seek the total expropriation, and perhaps the deaths, of Protestants. By 1700, about a quarter of the population was polarized into the identity of'Protestant', half of them members of the
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episcopal Church of Ireland, half Presbyterians located mainly in Ulster. This latter group posed a second challenge to the episcopal state church. According to Swift, 'the zealous presbyterians of the north are more alienated from the established clergy, than the romish priests; taxing the former with idolatrous worship, as disguised papists, ceremony-mongers, and many other terms of art; and this for a very powerful reason; because the clergy stand in their way, which the popish priests do not'.33 Yet the Presbyterians themselves suffered schism in 1725 between the 'Old Lights', supporters of the Westminster Confession of Faith, and a 'New Light' party rejecting the imposition of creeds, often for anti-Trinitarian reasons.
Defeat in 1691 was a disaster for the Catholics. William III did little to shield them from a Protestant Dublin parliament. By a series of acts, from the 1690s to the 1720s, Catholics were subjected to a catalogue of civil disabilities. Such legislation, passed piecemeal, soon earned the systematizing title 'the penal laws'. This code was, arguably, effective: there were no Jacobite Irish risings like those of 1715 and 1745 in Scotland, and the position of the Irish Catholic interest steadily weakened. The anti-Catholic legislation on the statute book was therefore less and less enforced after c. 1720 and Catholic worship won a de facto toleration. Yet although coercingpeople into religious belief later acquired a bad name, the provision of material reasons for adherence to religious truth posed no problem for the clergy of the Church of Ireland: they adopted a strategy which would have been pursued by their Catholic co-religionists had the result of the war of 1689-91 been different.
Moreover, this strategy proved largely successful: before the emergence of Daniel O'Connell's populist Irish nationalism in the 1820s, Roman Catholics in Ireland as well as in England were increasingly seen as potential supporters of a monarchical state, a reversal that the American and French revolutions served to confirm. So evident was this shift that the Irish parliament felt able to pass Catholic Relief Acts in 1778 and 1782, which dismantled the penal code with respect to religious worship, education, andlandownership; further relaxations followed in 1792-93. In 1780, the rural plebeian violence with its revolutionary and republican undertones that was to characterize the last two decades of the century could hardly be foreseen: as in England, the state church in Ireland appeared to be the route to increasing harmony and prosperity.
Legal discrimination against Protestant Dissenters was less effective. Presbyterians flourished in Ulster; their sense of grievance, combined with their ancient resistance theory, found expression in colonial America, which witnessed mass emigration from Ulster in the early 1770s, and in a domestic political campaign that almost saw Ireland break free from English domination
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during the American war. As in England, it was Protestant rather than Roman Catholic Dissent that posed the major challenge.
Irish High Churchmen identified their church as a true branch of the Universal Church, its ancient Catholic but non-Roman identity established by the Briton, Saint Patrick. Apostolicity and purity of primitive doctrine rather than majority status had to be the backbone of its rationale, and into the 1780s Irish clergy continued to deploy this ecclesiology against challenges from Catholicism or Presbyterianism. Some churchmen emphasized one threat, some the other; all agreed that there was a lasting danger to the church's position. Where in England this pattern of controversy had faded, in Ireland it remained the essence of debate.
If Apostolicity and primitive doctrine were the Irish church's foundations, one other component of the English church's rationale was lacking. The relatively small numbers of adherents had made a Warburtonian vision of the identity of church and state implausible in Ireland from the outset. Where England had a debate on 'church and state', Ireland had a debate on the 'penal code'. An Irish Toleration Act in 1719 provided for freedom of worship for Protestant Dissenters, but attempts to repeal the Irish Test of 1704 failed in 1719 and 1733. The Irish church generated little debate on ecclesiology, drawing rather on English rationales. The Irish church was insufficiently endowed fully to support a native intelligentsia. For that reason, it held even more firmly to teachings of the Caroline divines.
State churches were also exactly that: churchmen might confine their rationales to their own country without feeling any pressing need to test their formulae against a neighbouring one. Warburton failed to mention Ireland, or any other polity in which many denominations enjoyed an approximate equality. On the surface, his position was that numbers, not truth, justified the Reformation: after a change of numbers, 'the alliance between the Popish Church and the kingdom of England was broken; and another made with the Protestant, in its stead'.34 Yet Warburton's argument was ultimately an appeal to truth, not to utility. In the 1736 edition, he had used an Irish analogy that he later deleted. It would, he argued, produce 'Confusion . . . had every Sect free Entry into the Administration'; 'He who would see a lively Image of the intolerable Mischiefs, that arise from thence to Civil Society may read two Tracts wrote by a great Wit in defence of the Irish Test; and particularly that fine Discourse above referred to, intitled a Vindication of the Corporation and Test Acts'.35 He thereby fell back both on Thomas Sherlock and, by clear allusion, Jonathan Swift.36 Yet Swift, as an Irish High Churchman, had argued on quite different grounds.37 Nor was Warburton alone in avoiding writing on
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the religious settlements of neighbouring countries: in 1798, the English High Churchman Charles Daubeny, who more openly based the title of the English church on truth, equally ignored Scotland and Ireland.38
The 'established' church in Ireland thus lacked a powerful rationale for its public role; an alternative model, the idea of a 'Protestant Ascendancy', was not formulated until late in the century. Rural terrorist disturbances from the 1780s encouraged Richard Woodward, Bishop of Cloyne, to identify the Church of Ireland and its established status with the Protestant landowning interest. This formulation proved attractive to that social constituency but unappealing to a ministry in London which was seeking a broader base for Anglo-Irish co-existence: from 1791-92, the Britishgovernmentbeganto pursue the opposite policy of granting political rights to Irish Catholics.39 Woodward's new formulation was functional; yet even he recognized that the utilitarian aspect of Paley's rationale for established churches was 'subversive of the Protestant government of Ireland', and so, arguably, it proved to be.40
Scotland
The Church of Scotland inherited the established status of the medieval church, but was fundamentally reformed into a Presbyterian polity in the late sixteenth century and again after 1688. It was more plausible to contend that the Reformation in Scotland had broken the link between church and crown, whereas in England that conclusion was harder to draw. Yet this key issue was not clear, since Episcopalians and Presbyterians remained locked in conflict for possession of a single Scots church. The episcopal system restored in 1660 was more of an attempt at compromise than its English parallel; it did not, for example, challenge existing presbyterial ordinations. Nonetheless, this solution failed, first in the face of armed resistance by the Presbyterian Covenanters, and again when the Scots bishops made clear the limits of their allegiance to William III. In 1690, the Presbyterian system was instituted by an act of the Scots parliament in an embittered setting,41 and the Presbyterian settlement was continually threatened by a possible Stuart Restoration for which the Episcopalians longed.
The Scots church had been subject to a much larger dose of Calvinism in the later sixteenth century than the English. Consequently it found it difficult to present itself as the church of all the Scots; its Genevanzeal cast it increasingly as a gathered church of the elect. It subscribed to what looked like a foundation document, the Westminster Confession of Faith, ratified by the Edinburgh parliament in 1647. The Confession was based on the Scottish Solemn League
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and Covenant of 1643, a document that had led to a Scots attempt to impose Calvinism and Presbyterianism on England. Ironically, this attempt to separate church and state meant that the Church of Scotland became more like a parliamentary church.
In Scotland the union of church and state after 1688 was effected implicitly, from the bottom up. Presbyterianism militantly rejected the idea of the civil magistrate as simultaneously the head both of church and state, and rejected an episcopacy chosen by the king. Instead it developed, as English Presbyterianism did not, an elaborate formal structure of church governance to regulate itself without state intervention, rising in a pyramid from the parish kirk-session through the presbyteries and synods to the General Assembly, meeting annually in Edinburgh. It entailed the separation of the church from the state: following the union of 1707, Scots ministers could not vote in parliamentary elections, as clergy did in England; Scots ministers could not sit in the Westminster House of Commons; the Scots church had no direct representation in the House of Lords. No Scots equivalents of England's Corporation or Test Acts restricted civil office to Presbyterians; but, in so heavily and coercively Presbyterian a society, such provisions were unnecessary. So effective was the link between church government and local government that few ministers became magistrates, in strong contrast to English practice.
This formal separation of church and state generated little Scottish reflection on the nature of the establishment. Instead it gave rise to conflict within the ranks of Presbyterians, and to limited but bitter controversy in the one area where the church might claim wholly to regulate its own affairs: its claim to appoint ministers, a claim set against landowners' and the crown's pre-Reformation rights of patronage. Patronage was property and therefore inheritable; so were rights to the teind (tithe), for, as with the tithe in England, the teinds in Scotland had often been appropriated by landowners at the Reformation, and (despite repeated and unavailing petitions to parliament from the General Assembly after 1740) only a proportion of it now found its way to the local minister. Both practices were offensive to zealous Presbyterians, who in their campaigns against them drew on popular egalitarianism and resentment at local wealth.
Patronage had been revived along with the restored episcopacy in 1660. Triumphant Presbyterianism abolished private patronage in 1690, and in 1707 the Act of Union had embodied guarantees to maintain the existing Scottish church settlement. In 1712, however, the Tory-dominated Westminster parliament restored lay patronage in Scotland, and Whig ministries after 1714 declined to remedy what many Scots perceived as a major grievance. Many
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patrons initially responded to the popular anti-patronage feeling by declining to impose their own candidates. However, from the reign of George II they increasingly did so, thus gradually changing the character of the ministry, moving it in a more moderate direction. This tendency was clearly understood by the so-called Popular party in the Scots church, which resisted private patronage as emblematic of worldliness and spiritual lukewarmness, characteristics that they claimed to detect in the softened Calvinism of the Moderate party from the 1750s.
Presbyterianism tended to fragment; but the fragments generally agreed on the principle of a state church, and divided on which of them was worthy of that role. Only during the eighteenth century did these divisions slowly lead to new denominations and a de facto voluntarism. In 1733, the Secession Church broke from the established Presbyterian Church over adherence to the Covenants, patronage and unhappiness with the growing moderatism among the clergy. They began to absorb numbers of surviving Covenanters in the south west. Rancorous in tone, and sometimes millenarian, its members preserved the resistance theories of the Covenanters but without renouncing the principle of a state church. This sect split again in 1747 over the legitimacy of its members taking an oath of allegiance to the crown on accepting local office. The state church ideal was however soon explicitly rejected by another body of Presbyterian seceders, the so-called Relief Church, founded in 1761 by Thomas Gillespie, a minister who hadbeen deposed from his charge in the national church in 1752 for his opposition to patronage. This sect lacked the stark Calvinism of the Secession Church; with lat-itudinarian attitudes to membership, its numbers expanded substantially by 1800.
Among the other seceders were the Glassites; they took their name from John Glas (1695-1773), ejected from his living in 1730 for challenging the Presbyterian tenet of a national church. Such a challenge attracted few Scots supporters, although the position was inherited by Robert Sandeman (1718-71), who gave his name to what was in effect a Congregational challenge to Presbyterianism. These growing (and, in some areas, substantial) secessions from the established church predated the revival of Dissent in England after about 1780, and more seriously weakened the state church ideal north of the border.
It has been argued that, after 1707, the Kirk's General Assembly became a substitute for the Scots parliament. If so, it was a substitute that acted in general accord with the Whig authorities in London, not as a catalyst of anti-unionist feeling, let alone of a proto-nationalism. In the seventeenth century, Scots Presbyterianism had been closely correlated with resistance theory and its
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application; in the eighteenth, this correlation was eroded, just as the tendency of Presbyterianism to fragment prevented any nationalist flowering like that promoted by the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland: there was to be no Scots version of Daniel O'Connell.
In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the government of the United Kingdom deliberately used its established churches to forward its social policy, acknowledging clergy as agents of the state in the work of social improvement and political stabilization. This had already worked in England, Wales, and Scotland; after 1801, it was applied to Ireland. By 1829 it had failed there, and a candid acceptance of its failure by the London government meant fundamental redefinition in England also. None the less, in 1780, even in the middle of a momentous war of religion in the North American colonies, the extent of the later challenge to the establishment ideal was seldom foreseen.
Notes
1. [William Warburton], The alliance between church and state (London, 1736); here cited from the 1766 edn, in Richard Hurd (ed.), The works of the Right Reverend William Warburton D.D., 12 vols. (London, 1811), vol. 7, pp. 241-2, 250.
2. William Paley, The principles of moral and political philosophy (London, 1785), p. 556.
3. W[illiam] S[ancroft], A sermon preached in S. Peter's Westminster, on the first Sunday in Advent (London, 1660), p. 39.
4. [Gilbert Burnet], An impartial survey and comparison of the Protestant religion, as by law established (London, 1684).
5. [Sancroft], Sermon, pp. 9-11.
6. Robert Sanderson, Episcopacy (as established by law in England) notprejudicial to regalpower (London, 1661), pp. 13-15, 21, 32, 40.
7. [William Lloyd], A seasonable discourse shewing the necessity of maintaining the established religion, in opposition to popery (London, 1673), pp. 10-17.
8. The Works of Mr. Richard Hooker, ed. Isaak Walton (London, 1666), pp. 447-8.
9. [Simon Patrick], A friendly debate between a Conformist and a Non-Conformist (London, 1669).
10. [Samuel Parker], A discourse of ecclesiastical politic. (London, 1670), pp. ii, 10, 112-13, 174, 199-200.
11. [Thomas Comber], Religion and loyalty supportingeach other (London, 1681), pp. 37,39-40, 59-
12. John Potter, A discourse of church-government (London, 1707), sigs. A2r-A3v, pp. 2,11-12, 53,124,139-40, 213.
13. Edmund Gibson, Codex Juris Ecclesiastici Anglicani, 2 vols. (London, 1713), vol. 1, pp. i, iv, xvii-xix.
14. Thomas Wood, An institute of the laws of England (London, 1720; 2nd edn, 1722), pp. 2, 4, 396, 498-500.
15. Richard Burn, Ecclesiastical law, 2 vols. (London, 1763), vol. 1, p. 406.
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16. Benjamin Hoadly, A preservative against the principles and practices of the nonjurors both in church and state (London, 1716), pp. 2,72, 78, 90-1.
17. Benjamin Hoadly, The nature of the kingdom, or church, of Christ. A sermon . . . March 31, 1717 (London, 1717), pp. n-12, 30.
18. William Law, Three letters to the Bishop of Bangor (London, 1721).
19. Thomas Lathbury, A history of the convocation of the Church of England, 2nd edn (London, 1853)-
20. Warburton, Works, vol. 7, p. 368 (postscript to the fourth edition).
21. Warburton, Works, vol. 7, pp. 281-2.
22. Warburton, Works, vol. 7, pp. 242-3; [Warburton], Alliance (1736), pp. 110-11.
23. Thomas Sherlock, A vindication of the Corporation and Test Acts. In answer to the Bishop of Bangor's reasons for the repeal of them (London, 1718), p. 31.
24. Warburton, Works, vol. 7, p. 287.
25. 'Of religious establishments and of toleration', in Paley, Principles of moral andpolitical philosophy, pp. 554-7, 579.
26. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the laws of England, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1765-9), vol. 4, pp. 41-65; for Blackstone's indebtedness to Wood, see Thomas A. Green's introduction to the Chicago edition (1979), vol. 4, p. iii.
27. Blackstone, Commentaries, vol. 4, pp. 52-3.
28. Blackstone, Commentaries, vol. 4, pp. 53, 57-8, 432.
29. Quoting 1 Ventris p. 293: Blackstone, Commentaries, vol. 4, p. 59.
30. Blackstone, Commentaries, vol. 1, pp. 47-9.
31. Blackstone, Commentaries, vol. 1, pp. 364-83, at 367.
32. [John Bowles], The claims of the established church; considered as an apostolical institution, and as an authorised interpreter of Holy Scripture. By a layman (1815; London, 1817), pp. 2-5, 15,75,78.
33. The advantages proposed by repealing the sacramental test, impartially considered (1732), in The works of Jonathan Swifi, 6 vols. (London, 1755), vol. 5, p. 222.
34. Warburton, Works, vol. 7, pp. 242-4.
35. [Warburton], Alliance (1736), p. 117.
36. [Swift], The advantages propos'd by repealing the sacramental test; idem, The Presbyterians plea of merit; In order to take off the test, impartially examined (Dublin, 1733).
37. Swift consistendy adopted a pose of moderation, but did so in a way that virtually endorsed one of the positions between which he professed to steer: The sentiments of a Church of England man with respect to religion and government (London, 1708), in Swift, Works, vol. 2, pp. 53-80, at 57.
38. Charles Daubeny, A guide to the church, in several discourses (London, 1798).
39. Jacqueline Hill, 'The meaning and significance of "Protestant Ascendancy", 1787-1840', in Lord Blake (ed.), Ireland after the Union (Oxford, 1989), pp. 1-22.
40. Woodward, Present state ofthe Church of Ireland, p. vii; Peter Nockles, 'Church or Protestant sect? The Church of Ireland, high churchmanship and the Oxford Movement, 1822-1869', Historical journal, 41 (1998), pp. 457-93, at 467.
41. John Sage, An account ofthe late establishment of Presbyterian government by the Parliament of Scotland in Anno 1690. Together with the methods by which it was settled, and the consequences of it (London, 1693).
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The church in economy and society
PHILIP T. HOFFMAN
In early modern Europe, Christianity touched most people's lives, from their baptism shortly after birth to the funeral services after death. Christianity affected even mundane details of daily existence. Tolling church bells marked the time of day, and at least in Catholic regions, saints' feast days were used to designate when a market was held or a debt was due. The Sabbath and feast days dictated when Christians rested, and the vast majority of Europeans who toiled in the fields turned a significant portion of what they produced (often on the order of 7 per cent or so of the major crops) over to churches that had rights to the tithe.
Christian churches owned large amounts of property too, particularly in Catholic countries, and throughout Europe they ran or supervised charities, schools, and universities. They were also what we would today call major employers, for they provided both men and women with a religious calling. And of course they exhorted the faithful to lead Christian lives. Precisely what that meant might be different in Rome and Geneva, but it would certainly influence a believer's dealings in early modern society.
Since Christianity extended its reach into nearly every corner of life, one can naturally ask what effect it had on economy and society, especially in a period (1660-1815) that witnessed not just the dislocations of the French Revolution but the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in England. One can turn the question around too, and ask how the economy affected the Christian churches. These questions have long interested historians and social scientists -notably the sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920). Butthe connectionhe detected nearly a century ago between a 'Protestant ethic' and a 'spirit of capitalism' is far from the last word on the links between Christianity and the economy. There is much more that can be said today about the ties between Christianity and the economy, especially about the central question of economic history -explaining economic growth.
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Church property and rights to the tithe
In Protestant Europe, the Reformation had stripped away a considerable amount of church property, much of it coming from monasteries that were dissolved. The land, real estate, and other assets that had once belonged to the church fell into the hands of secular authorities or served to fund schools, universities, and charities. Protestant churches did possess some property and still retained most rights to the tithe, but they owned far less than religious institutions in Catholic territories.
Precisely how much property the Catholic Church had is not easily determined. One reason is that contemporary accounts of the church's assets and early historical analyses of what it owned were often biased. Eighteenth-century reformers who wanted their governments to confiscate church land often exaggerated the church's holdings. Nineteenth-century historians of suppressed religious houses, who lamented what the church had gone through, would do the same, while their anticlerical opponents might be tempted to minimize the damage. Further complicating the task of estimating the church's wealth is the way it varied from country to country, from region to region, and over time as well. If we limit ourselves to real estate, then in France, for instance, the clergy held some 6 per cent of the land on the eve of the French Revolution, but their holdings dropped to below 2 per cent in parts of the south and rose to nearly 40 per cent in parts of the north. In Bavaria, the percentage is even higher: over half the forest and farm land was in church hands. For Catholic Europe as a whole, it has been asserted that the regular clergy alone possessed perhaps 10 and even as much as 30 per cent of the real estate in Catholic countries, but the true figure, which we will never know, may well be different. And real estate was not the Catholic Church's only asset. It also had pensions, the tithe, cash gifts from the faithful, and rights to a variety of seigniorial dues, and the income from its land and other assets made it a major employer not just of artists, musicians, craftsmen and servants, but of lawyers and estate managers as well.
The wealth the Catholic Church had was not evenly distributed - some (though not all) parish priests might have very little, while the abbot of an ancient monastery might have a great deal - but it turned the richer Catholic institutions into political plums for rulers and the aristocracy. In France and Spain, monarchs exercised control over a number of the major benefices and used them as a form of patronage to reward supporters and officials and their families. The practice was pushed to extremes in France, where the king could give supporters (or a member of their families) control over wealthy
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religious houses by making them absentee priors or abbots. The abbots and priors did not have to be members of the religious orders, and they could hold several of these benefices at the same time. The reward was the large income benefices generated once the expenses of the priory or abbey had been paid. Richelieu, for instance, earned roughly a third of his immense revenue from such benefices in the early seventeenth century, and in the eighteenth century, the King of France had rights to nominate nearly a thousand absentee abbots, plus over one hundred bishops and numerous pension holders as well.
Monarchs were not the only ones in Catholic lands with control over benefices - far from it. In the Holy Roman Empire, families from the upper Catholic aristocracy had power over many cathedral chapters. They used the canonries (and other benefices too) to support their kin and to advance their interests and those of princely families to whom they were allied. Nobles in many parts of Italy could also appropriate the income from benefices, even though the Counter-Reformation papacy managed to impose a bit of meritocracy in appointments to the church livings it controlled. Not that the income from the Catholic Church's assets was all squandered on political spoils. It supported nuns who worked in hospitals and regular clergymen who taught in schools and colleges, and it provided charity for the poor and a refuge for unmarried women in societies that offered little place for ladies without husbands - all this even when absentee benefice holders were skimming much of the revenue off from the top. Nor was the Catholic Church alone in having such problems, for there were in fact parallels within the Lutheran and Anglican Churches. In Scandinavia and Germany, a young Lutheran cleric usually needed a patron, such as a local lord or a city councillor, to get a better paying post, for otherwise he risked being out in the countryside, where he was likely to subsist on a modest stipend. Similarly, in England, patronage in the Anglican Church was often used for political purposes, and the income from the tithe and glebe lands did not all end up in the pockets of the parson it was meant to support. Instead, much of it went to bishops, cathedral chapters, or the local gentry who often controlled clerical appointments.
Beyond using church assets as political plums, Catholic rulers also sought to tax the church's wealth, even though in theory its property was tax exempt. Needless to say, the pope and clergy struggled to resist, but they were far from completely successful. The kings of Spain taxed church property, as did the Habsburgs, notably when they had to defend their Austrian lands from the Turks. In France, the clergy developed a representative body that offered the king what was called a 'free gift' but in reality it was little different from taxation. If Catholic rulers were limited in the taxes they could impose on
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the church's wealth, they could at least try to keep donors from giving the church additional property, for once it was in church hands, it would escape the full force of the state's levies. Their worry was that each new donation would erode the tax base, leaving Catholic rulers at a disadvantage relative to their Protestant counterparts - a fear that seemed particularly pronounced in the divided confessional map of Germany.
Concerns of this sort furnished one of the motives (though certainly not the only one) for the religious reforms that Maria Theresa initiated in the Habsburg lands in the eighteenth century and that her son, Joseph II, pushed even further. Maria Theresa and Joseph II wanted both to strengthen the state and to help reform the Catholic Church. In particular, they sought to redistribute the church's holdings in a more useful way. As Maria Theresa's 'Political Testament' explained, bequeathing more property to the church was not 'laudable' but 'culpable', for the clergy did 'not need it' and made bad use of what it already had. Maria Theresa and her son therefore suppressed a number of monasteries, confiscated their property, and limited further donations to the church. Many of the assets they seized from monasteries (and from the Jesuits when they were suppressed in 1773) were then redeployed to support parishes, schools, and charities.1
In France, the unequal distribution of the Catholic Church's wealth fed into the grievances voiced by parish priests, grievances directed at the upper clergy on the eve of the French Revolution. The parish priests believed that they were the most useful members of the clergy and felt that they should therefore be exercising greater authority within the Catholic Church. In instances where they were relatively poor - which, once again, was not always the case -their complaints against the regular clergy or the bishops could be quite vociferous, particularly over the issue of the minimum income (the so called portion congrue) that rich absentee tithe owners had to provide for parish priests. The parish priests were of course not the only ones to criticize the Catholic Church's wealth, for a number of the philosophers mounted their own attack. They might argue, as Turgot did for instance, that money left to the church would eventually be diverted from the pious goals that the donors intended and that even money earmarked for support of the poor would only encourage paupers to cease working and to take up begging.
It was hardly startling then that the revolutionary regime confiscated the Catholic Church's property in France and abolished the tithe. Nor was it surprising that the confiscations spread once the French armies had conquered other Catholic territories, where church's wealth had provoked similar criticisms. Beyond its appeal to critics of the Catholic Church, the nationalization
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of church land had a number of political advantages. In France, it was a means of staving off government bankruptcy. Elsewhere - in Italy, for instance - it could give the French invaders revenue that they needed to fight their wars. The French, though, were not the only ones who profited from confiscating church property. In Germany, both the Protestant rulers of Prussia and the Catholic rulers of Bavaria were eager to lay their hands on the church's assets; the French invasion and the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire facilitated their task.
The secularization had a devastating effect on education and charity in some Catholic regions, particularly in Germany, where it wiped out eighteen Catholic universities as well as schools that had been supported by monasteries. The effect was a lasting one, for little of the secularized property was returned the church during the Restoration. Secularization also affected what we might call the market for 'careers' in the Catholic Church, at least at the highest levels, for there were no longer large numbers of high income benefices that could be reserved for nobles and political insiders. Most patronage was now gone, and bishops had more say about where priests were to be assigned. Lucrative benefices that had once attracted a disproportionate number of Catholic clergymen to cities were now suppressed, making the priesthood less attractive, at least to some candidates. That may be one of the causes (though certainly not the only one) for a decline in ordinations observed in some parts of Catholic Europe in the late eighteenth century. The loss of wealth harmed other professions as well. In Germany, prince-bishops and their courts disappeared, meaning fewer jobs for 'musicians, librarians, painters, [and] architects'.2
One thing that loss of the church's property did not affect, however, was agriculture, even though much of the property the church lost was farm land. Although one might imagine this land would be farmed more effectively by its new lay owners, nothing of the sort happened, and for a good reason: the monasteries, churches, and other ecclesiastical institutions that had owned the property before nationalization had already been working it efficiently Most of the church property was rented out, and churches and monasteries administered theirproperty just as adeptly as secular landlords. They developed the expertise needed to manage property well and with their wealth they could make investments and also take on some risks. Around Paris, for example, the Cathedral of Notre Dame leased its farms to the highest bidder, but it was careful not to squeeze so much from its tenants that they would be ruined. Like a good landlord, the cathedral knew that it should reward good tenants and cut them some slack if weather destroyed crops. Its practices here followed the advice given by early modern experts and fit what a modern economist
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would advise as well. The same held for the cathedral's investments. It did put money into its agricultural properties - by paying for the construction of new barns, for example, or by helping tenants to undertake improvements - but it apparently only did so if the return on its investments exceeded what it could earn elsewhere. It was behaving, in short, just the way an economist would want. And Notre Dame was not unusual. Evidence from many other parts of Catholic Europe suggests that monasteries administered their farmland in the same way that secular landlords did, and in some instances - in Bavaria, for example - farms fell into ruin when they left the church's hands.
Christianity's effect on labour markets and other economic transactions
Most early modern Europeans were peasants, and historians have long imagined that they produced nearly all that they needed for themselves. They were by and large self-sufficient, this historical tradition maintains, and they did not participate in markets. Theirs was a moral economy, isolated from market forces.
Recent research suggests, however, that this historical tradition is wrong, at least for much of western Europe. By the eighteenth century, if not long before, many peasants in western Europe sold what they produced, rented land, and worked for wages or hired help in local labour markets. There were also markets - and labour markets in particular - in cities and towns, markets for skilled artisans, unskilled lawyers, and also professionals, such as lawyers or even clergymen, who were deeply interested in what their benefice or living happened to pay.
Christianity, one might assume, must have influenced these economic transactions, and especially labour markets. After all, Christianity drew members of the educated elite into the clergy and thus diverted them from occupations that a modern secular observer (and perhaps some of the most radical eighteenth-century reformers too) might consider more 'productive'. It also admonished the faithful to observe the Sabbath, and at least in some churches, not to work on holy days. But what real impact did its teachings and its employment of clergy ultimately have on labour markets?
One can quickly set aside the idea that the clergy were somehow an immense drag on the economy. To begin with, their numbers were simply too small to have had much of an effect on the economy, no matter how productive one might imagine that they would have been had they been working at other tasks. In southern Italy, for instance, the regular and secular clergy amounted
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to perhaps i or 2 per cent of the population. The figures might be a bit higher in cities such as Rome, which had attractive benefices, but overall the male clergy and female religious too were never close to being a sizeable fraction of the population. In late eighteenth-century France, the numbers were even tinier: some 0.6 per cent of the population, including female religious. The figures were smaller still in Protestant regions - perhaps 0.1 or 0.2 per cent of the population, for instance, in parts of Lutheran Germany.
Moving 1 per cent, or at most 2 per cent, of the population to other work would simply not have had much of an effect on the overall economy. And even imagining such a redeployment of the clergy ignores the fact that the clerics were, in many cases, doing precisely what many Europeans wanted. They were preaching or saying Masses or providing solace for the bereaved, and putting an end to their ministry would upset people, as the popular opposition to radical de-Christianization during the French Revolution demonstrates. Having the clergy do something else, even if it had been possible, would have left these faithful Christians worse off, and in that sense would have actually set the economy back. In addition, many of the clerics and female religious were already doing work that even the most anti-religious modern observer would have to concede was useful. In Catholic territories, nuns worked in hospitals, and male religious staffed schools. Lutheran ordinands in Scandinavia and Germany served as tutors or teachers. Shifting them to other work would disrupt schools and charity, as it did during the secularization of church property in Catholic lands.
Christianity affected labour markets in other ways besides hiring members of the clergy, however. It taught the faithful to honour the Sabbath and not to work on Sundays, and the ban on working extended, at least in the mind of much of the population, not just to the liturgical calendar's major feast days, but to numerous saints' days as well, most of which were usually the occasion for festivals and celebrations. In Bamberg in Germany, for example, there were forty-four feast days on which work was completely forbidden in 1642, and another ten on which work was outlawed for half the day - all in addition, of course, to the fifty-two Sundays of the year. The Protestant Reformation suppressed a number of these feast days; so did many Catholic Reformers, who, although they took longer to act than the Protestants, shared their concern with the drunkenness, lechery, violence, and 'superstition' that the festivals and celebrations seemed to cause. For similar reasons, civil authorities also cracked down on the feast days. In 1669, for instance, Louis XIV's finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert exhorted the kingdom's bishops to cut back the number of feast days in their dioceses.
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As a result, the number of feast days fell. In Bamberg, for example, it dropped by 1789 to a total of only eighteen feast days on which work was completely forbidden and none on which it was partially outlawed. Cutting back on the feast days did provoke popular opposition, but it also meant that men and women worked more each year. The longer working year, it has been argued, may in turn explain much of the increase in output observed during the early years of Industrial Revolution. If so, then the Industrial Revolution did not really boost productivity much before 1800, despite all the new technology of steam engines and cotton textile production. Nor did it really increase per capita consumption. People did have more money to spend on new consumer goods, but they were simply working longer, and their higher incomes had been purchased at the expense of their free time, a valuable 'commodity' that they now did without. All in all, then, they were not that much better off, at least by 1800, but they were working harder, thanks to a broad campaign that made people more 'industrious' than they had been in the past.3
It is conceivable that Christian charity also had an impact on early modern labour markets. Philosophers such as Turgot feared that pious bequests would encourage paupers to give up workfor a life of begging, and critics could always point to cases in which beggars took money they had collected at a church door and immediately drank it up at the nearest tavern or cabaret.4 Religious zeal induced both Protestants and Catholics to leave money to the poor and to create institutions to help them, and this sort of charity was particularly pronounced under the resurgent Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation, at least if we judge from work by French historians, who have paid particularly close attention to religious charity in the early modern period. Do they find that religious charity actually drew a significant number of people away from the labour market?
The answer, in all likelihood, is no. That at least is the conclusion that emerges from what happened in Grenoble in south-eastern France. To judge from bequests made in wills, Catholic religious charity in Grenoble peaked in the 1690s and then was forced down by an economic downturn. Many of the paupers who received this charity, however, were not employed in the first place and so could not have been drawn away from the labour market, no matter what critics such as Turgot might have thought. They were aged, sick, orphans, or women with young children, who could not be expected to work. Furthermore, religious charity in early modern Europe was simply too small to have much of an impact on the labour market. Philosophers such as Turgot were not the only ones to fret about the incentives that assistance might create, whether it was religious or public, but despite all the worrying over the
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centuries, sizeable help for the poor from any source was a twentieth-century creation.
The greatest effect Christianity had on labour markets, however, came from the role it played in the abolition of slavery and the slave trade. Although abolition was a nineteenth-century achievement, its roots go back to this period, to Enlightenment attacks on slavery and even more so to the campaign against slavery mounted by English evangelicals such as William Wilberforce (1759-1833). Wilberforce and his fellow evangelicals fought for a wide variety of social reforms, but their greatest achievement was the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807. Their campaign helped end slavery itself within the Empire by 1840, and it led the British government to press other European powers to withdraw from the slave trade in the years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. This was the first major step against slavery, for it had a far greater impact than the anti-slavery measures adopted during the French Revolution, which were reversed by Napoleon. It was no doubt one of Christianity's finest moments, for as recent research has shown, slavery was in fact profitable and would not have disappeared on its own. Thanks in large part to the evangelicals, the traffic that had hauled some eleven million human beings out of Africa in chains finally came to an end, and by 1888 slavery itself would disappear from the western world.
Christianity's economic influence certainly extended beyond the labour market. Usury legislation immediately comes to mind, and so too do church teachings on marriage and the family, for in early modern Europe the decision to wed and have children was in large part an economic one. Marriages were often arranged by parents eager to secure their children's fortunes or their own. As a result, a young man and woman, even if they were peasants, did not usually wed until they possessed enough (either through their own savings or gifts and inheritances from their families) to support one another. There were still a number of bans on marrying relatives in Catholicism (some survived in Protestantism too), and these barriers limited the number of eligible marriage partners available for a prospective bride or groom.
There is also a possible connection between Christianity and the early use of birth control, at least in France, where the practice of coitus interruptus began to spread in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly in areas where the clergy supported the Revolution. The likely reason, according to Donald Sutherland, is that the Revolutionary regime eventually drove away most of these priests, even though they had supported the Revolution, at least in its early stages. Many regions ended up with no one who could denounce birth control from the pulpit, and their anticlerical
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parishioners were in any case not likely to heed sermons against birth control.5
Nonetheless, Christianity's greatest impact was no doubt on labour markets, not on financial transactions or the 'marriage' market. Theological arguments against lending at interest had come under attack by the end of the Middle Ages, and by the seventeenth century there were enough loopholes in both Protestant and Catholic lands to allow all sorts of innovative financial transactions, from stock markets in Amsterdam to short-term money markets in Lyon. And the eighteenth century, with its stock market bubbles in London and Paris, witnessed even more financial innovation. It is doubtful whether the legislation restricting marriages was very effective either, for even in Catholic lands a young couple could often get an exemption, and from an economic perspective marriages between individuals who were not related might actually have been beneficial because it would help couples diversify their assets. And whether they were Protestant or Catholic, the other European countries were much slower to adopt birth control than was France.
Where Christianity made its most definitive mark was thus in the abolition of the slave trade and in the contribution Protestant and Catholic Reformers made to the campaign to reduce the number of feast days. There are of course still other ways that Christianity affected the economy: the religious intolerance of the period, for example, divided Protestant from Catholic and Christian from Jew, thereby making it impossible for many individuals to trade with one another. The economic damage this lamentable intolerance did, however, has yet to be determined.
The Protestant ethic, the spirit of capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution changed the world forever. From its beginnings in eighteenth-century Britain, it set capitalist economies on the path of sustained economic growth, something unknown in the pre-modern world. That meant unending technical change and repeated increases in per capita income, first in Britain and then, after 1800, in other parts of western Europe and countries of European settlement. Initially, growth was slow (up until 1800, as we have seen, most of the increased income in Britain came at the expense of longer working hours and so was not growth at all), and it came at the expense of dislocating social change, as people left the countryside to toil in urban mills. Nor were its benefits evenly spread throughout society, particularly at the outset. Yet by 1870 the average citizen of Britain (and the same is true for much
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of the rest of western Europe and of the United States, Australia, and New Zealand) lived longer and was better off than his ancestors had been. He was also far richer than the average African, Asian, or Latin American.
Explaining why the Industrial Revolution started in England and why it was western Europe (and not some other part of the world such as China) that jumped ahead is the great enigma of economic history, one that has interested historians and social scientists alike. What was it that gave western Europe -and Britain in particular - a head start on the path of capitalist economic growth?
Given the central role that Christianity has played in European history, one might look to religion for the answer. The best-known attempt to connect Christianity and capitalist growth is no doubt Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In this famous work, Weber did not say Calvinism caused the Industrial Revolution; rather, he posited a more subtle link between Calvinism and capitalist growth. At bottom, his argument was that the teachings of Calvin and of Puritan divines unintentionally helped legitimate capitalist behaviour. In particular, they encouraged savings, investment, and the relentless pursuit of profit, all of which Weber considered hallmarks of capitalism. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination left anxious believers looking for some sign that they had been saved. That sign would come from success as a capitalist, and capitalist behaviour would be reinforced by Protestant injunctions against idleness and extravagant consumption.
Much ink has been spilled over the Weber thesis, which has had a particularly strong appeal in sociology and among historians who work on Great Britain and New England. But it has encountered less success among historians of early modern religion, particularly those who work on continental Europe. They actually find an ethos similar to Weber's Protestant ethic in Counter-Reformation Catholicism and argue that both Calvinism and post-Tridentine Catholicism shared a common commitment (despite all their other differences) to the sort of disciplined behaviour associated with capitalism. If they are correct, then Weber's argument may reflect not a perceptive reading of the evidence, but his own psychology and the political attitudes of his milieu. From contemporary theology and Bismarck's battle against Catholicism, Weber had imbibed the belief that Protestantism was the better religion for modern society. But he also admired English and American Puritanism as a bulwark against the debilitating authoritarianism he despised in Germany. From there, the step to inventing the Protestant ethic was a short one indeed.
Weber's proponents would of course disagree. They would contend that Weber's critics have mangled his argument, which did not connect
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Protestantism and capitalism, but a Protestant 'ethic' and a 'spirit' of capitalism. Such subtlety, however, may in fact be a weakness, and it is not the only one that critics canpointto. Weber'smethodofidealtypes-inotherwords,his practice of constructing an idealized image from the blurred historical reality -may in fact do an injustice to the historical record, since it means shutting one's eyes to the messiness of reality. It may also have meant taking a situation that was specific to Germany, where Catholic education had suffered greatly from the confiscations of the revolutionary era, and mistakenly assuming that it was a generality true throughout the western world.
Is there then any hard evidence that bears Weber out? There is really none in Weber's original essay, for what little statistical evidence it contains does not stand up well to scrutiny. And much of the evidence that Weber's supporters point to - that Protestants were over represented among merchants, inventors, and entrepreneurs - is in fact inconclusive, for it could easily result from factors unrelated to Weber's Protestant ethic. If many of the early inventors and entrepreneurs in England happened to be Nonconformists, it could simply be that they were barred from pursuing careers in the government or the military. Similarly, the fact that Britain was the birth place of the Industrial Revolution might stem not from the influence of Puritanism, but from the country's secure property rights, low transportation costs, and abundant supply of skilled metal workers.
A real test of Weber's thesis has to take into consideration all these other factors that influence economic growth and try to distinguish their effect from that of Protestantism. One way to do that is to use statistics. When statistical techniques are applied to historical evidence from the countries of Europe over a long period stretching from 1300 to 1850, however, they suggest that there was no firm relationship between Protestantism and economic growth. Similar studies, which have been done using modern data, are also relevant here, for if the Weber thesis held in the past, it should hold today as well. But the most careful of these recent studies finds no clear evidence that Protestantism is more favourable for economic growth than Catholicism.
Another way to test the Weber thesis in an unambiguous way is to study Protestants and Catholics who live in the same community. Because they are both part of the same economy and polity, the non-religious factors affecting their economic success would therefore be nearly the same. The only major difference would be their religion, and by examining their fortunes, one could see, for instance, whether the Protestants saved more and were thus more likely to increase their wealth.
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Philip Benedict actually carried out such a study for the years 1605-59 in the French city of Montpellier, which was roughly equally divided between Calvinists and Catholics. He found no evidence that the Calvinists accumulated more wealth than their Catholic neighbours. The Calvinists did eventually lose political power in the city, but the loss did not seem to harm their fortunes. Indeed, their wealth grew as the city prospered. Yet Catholic wealth kept pace and in some instances forged ahead.6
What then is one to do with the Weber thesis? One option is to rework what he says, taking into account what we have learned about the history of early modern Europe since his day. That effort, which seeks to retain what is valuable in Weber, is currently underway. Alternatively, it may be time to remove Weber's thesis from the box of tools that historians use and consign it instead to the realm of quaint claims that make interesting subjects for historical study. The argument here would be that years of research in history and the social sciences have disproved both Weber's thesis about the Protestant ethic and a number of his key assumptions. Weber believed, for instance, that rational calculation was simply inconceivable without competitive markets.7 Yet much recent work in economics has been devoted to exploring rational behaviour outside of markets, behaviour that both economists and other social scientists have found quite prevalent, even in developing countries. Historical evidence also points to rational behaviour long ago in the past, even when markets were absent. The evidence thus seems to suggest that Weber was mistaken, and if so, we should perhaps look elsewhere for a connection between Christianity and the origins of the Industrial Revolution.
Where might one seek this connection? Perhaps in education and the transmission of skills, for it has been argued that established religion - and Catholicism in particular - worked against acquiring the sort of practical mechanical knowledge that was widespread in Britain and seemed to play such an important role in the Industrial Revolution.8 If this argument is correct, religious control of education was one of the barriers keeping students in continental Europe from learning the practical Newtonian mechanics that they needed to catch up with the British. The issue, though, is still controversial, not least because many historians do not accept the connection between this sort of knowledge and the Industrial Revolution. And others would point to very different paths to acquiring knowledge about mechanics and new technology -paths that may have had little at all to do with Christianity.9
In Catholic Europe, church property generated enough income to turn major benefices into attractive political plums for kings and noble families. The property - chiefly land, but also buildings, pensions, and tithe
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rights - made the Catholic Church an inviting target for reform in the eighteenth century and for confiscation during the French Revolution. The loss of the church's property affected recruitment of the clergy and it damaged charitable and educational establishments in Germany. It did not help agriculture, though, because ecclesiastical institutions were already expert and efficient landlords.
Christianity did influence labour markets. British evangelicals began a great battle to end the slave trade, and a quieter campaign - this one waged by Protestants and Catholics alike - helped reduce the number of feast days and increase the amount of time people spentatwork. The additional labour helped purchase new consumer goods and it may even account for much of the growth in per capita income in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. There are of course other links between Christianity and the economy, but at least one of the connections that scholars thought they perceived - Weber's Protestant ethic - now seems mistaken.
Notes
1. Ernst Wangermann, The Austrian achievement: 1 joo-1800 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), pp. 73-105; Karl Otmar Freiherr von Aretin, VomDeutschen Reich zumDeutschen Bund, Deutsche Geschichte, ed. Joachim Leuschner (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1980), pp. 54-5; Derek Beales, Prosperity and plunder: European Catholic monasteries in the age of revolution, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 179-230; Owen Chadwick The popes and European revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 250-2, 412-17.
2. Chadwick, Popes and European revolution, pp. 96-101, 503. For an example of declining vocations in Italy and their link to Joseph II's reforms, see Xenio Toscani, II clew lombardo dall'ancien regime alia restaurazione (Bologna: II Mulino, 1979), pp. 341-7,359-60.
3. Hans-Joachim Voth, 'The longest years: New estimates of labor input in England, 1760-1830' Journal ofeconomichistory, 61 (2001), pp. 1065-82, and'Time and work in eighteenth-century London', Journal of economic history, 58 (1998), pp. 29-58; Jan De Vries, 'Between purchasing power and the world of goods: Understanding the household economy in early modern Europe', in Roy Porter and John Brewer (eds.), Consumption and the world of goods (London: Roudedge, 1993), pp. 85-132, and 'The Industrial Revolution and the industrious revolution', Journal of economic history, 54 (1994), pp. 249-70. See also Gregory Clark and Ysbrand Van Der Werf, 'Work in progress? The industrious revolution', Journal of economic history, 58 (1998), pp. 840-3.
4. Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, 'Fondation', in Encyclopedic ou dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers, par une societe de gens de lettres, ed. Denis Diderot, 28 vols. (Paris, 1751-72), vol. 7, pp. 72-5; Kathryn Norberg, Rich and poor in Grenoble, 1600-1814 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 169.
5. D. M. G. Sutherland, The French Revolution and Empire: The quest for a civic order (Maiden: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 194, 344-5; and personal communication with the author.
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6. Philip Benedict, 'Faith, fortune and social structure in seventeenth-century Montpellier', Past and present, 152 (1996), pp. 46-78.
7. Max Weber, Gesamtausgabe, Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen, ed. Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer and Petra Kolonko (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1989), pp. 488-9.
8. Margaret C. Jacob, Scientific culture and the making of the industrial west (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 106-11,135-6,145,157-62.
9. See, for example, Joel Mokyr, The gifts of Athena: Historical origins ofthe knowledge economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
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PART II
CHRISTIAN LIFE IN THE EUROPEAN WORLD, 1660-1780
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This survey of the Catholic clergy in Europe, from 1650 to the eve of the French Revolution, will present a comparative outline of the various ecclesiastical groupings, divided into two main branches. The first of these, the secular clergy, consisted of the episcopal hierarchy and the lower clergy of parish priests, clerics belonging to the major orders, and the floating population of those who were in minor orders or merely tonsured. The regular clergy consisted of the male and female members of the monastic orders, the mendicant orders, and the regular congregations. If any conclusion may be drawn from these pages, it is that the different models and forms of Catholicism which developed in Europe between the Counter-Reformation and the Enlightenment, were all affected by the general trend towards uniformity and universalism directed by the Roman Church. But these new models were also influenced by both the ancient religious and political traditions which had permeated religious institutions and religious life for centuries, and by the specific political and social conditions which existed in different parts of Europe.
The Spanish and Portuguese bishops
Although they no longer possessed the religious and political status of the sixteenth-century episcopate, the Spanish bishops of the early seventeenth century continued to provide the principal model for the episcopal hierarchies of the whole of Europe. In the fifty-four Spanish dioceses, expanded to sixty in the eighteenth century, the bishops were all chosen by royal appointment. The majority had previously been canons of the cathedral chapters, and possessed university qualifications, most commonly degrees in canon and civil law. However, there were also bishops who had emerged from the regular orders, generally from the ranks of the Franciscans and Dominicans, who were
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for the most part graduates in theology. In every case, the candidates were asked to provide evidence oflimpieza de sangre, i.e., proof that they were not descendants of recently Christianized families (cristianos nuevos). Although the royal appointment system meant that there was the possibility of openings for candidates from economically modest backgrounds, nonetheless, candidates with aristocratic origins, whether from the upper or lower nobility, were very considerable in number.
Even if the Inquisition attempted to encroach in those areas which it believed to be within its competence, and sometimes attacked the bishops' authority and jurisdiction, the bishops remained very active in pastoral care. The residence requirement was generally respected, excepting the large dioceses of Toledo and Seville, whose incumbents were often assigned to political and diplomatic missions on behalf of the monarchy.
No prominent personalities stand out among the Spanish bishops of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They were stately individuals who had a heightened awareness of the responsibilities of their office. In the seventeenth century, they dedicated themselves to extensive charitable activities on behalf of the poor. During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, this interest was extended to some extent into civil, cultural, and social concerns. In the later eighteenth century the Spanish episcopacy generally supported Charles Ill's reform initiatives, in particular, the battle which would lead first to the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from Spain, and then to the Jesuits' suppression by the papacy in 1773. But the bishops also maintained a strong sense of tradition in relation to 'modernity', and a belief in the harmful consequences of ideas deriving from the French Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic invasion.
The Portuguese episcopate was similar to the Spanish, in terms of its appointment by the king, its pastoral activity, and its relations with the Inquisition, although it differed in its eighteenth-century evolution towards a more aristocratic recruitment. The patriarchal office of the see of Lisbon, obtained from John V at the beginning of the century, was reserved for the nobility, and the bishops of the other twelve Portuguese dioceses all originated in the court aristocracy or the minor nobility. As a consequence the ecclesiastical and episcopal structures were more closely linked to the state in Portugal than they were in Spain. Such links helped produce the long Rotura between Portugal and Rome from 1759 to 1769, and facilitated the minister Pombal's policies against the religious orders, especially the Jesuits.
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The French bishops
The French episcopate seemed to develop rather differently, as an alternative model to that of its Spanish counterparts, especially in the early decades of the seventeenth century. France was a country with a strong and active Calvinist minority, recognized by the Edict of Nantes in 1598. With the end of the wars of religion, a reconstruction of Catholic religious and ecclesiastical life became necessary. This was pursued within the framework of the approximately 130 French dioceses, dioceses which differed dramatically in size from the very large in the north of the country, to the very much smaller in the south. Here, as in the Iberian peninsula, the nomination of bishops was the monarch's privilege, and in the seventeenth century these appointments were generally successful. There was an increasing preference for candidates from the upper nobility, so that the aristocracy controlled all the French dioceses by the late eighteenth century.
Though in all Catholic European countries, the episcopate formed a prestigious ecclesiastical elite, in France the bishops were at the head of the first order of the state, with its own unique representative system (the Assembly of the Clergy). This Assembly was first convened in 1561 to contribute an agreed amount of money for the financial needs of the monarchy. Rapidly developing into a permanent body meeting every five years, the Assembly of the Clergy sought to overcome various financial and administrative problems within its areas of competence and to support the Gallican policies of the monarchy. Thus, it generally approved the four Gallican articles of 1682 and the king's repressive policies against the Calvinists, especially those in the dioceses of the Midi. Initially somewhat divided on the problem of Jansenism, a large anti-Jansenist majority developed among the bishops, as the effects of this opposition movement began to be felt in the religious, political, and cultural life of eighteenth-century France.
There was certainly no lack of abuses and scandal within the ranks of the seventeenth-century French episcopate, abuses which were reinforced by the sumptuous lifestyle and the irregular residence of the bishops. But a new model for the bishops was also emerging, based on a new theological and pastoral concept of the episcopacy, influenced by Saint Francis de Sales, by the Jansenist Duguet, and by the Borromaic and Vincentian movements. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the bishops increased their efforts to train the diocesan clergy, creating many new seminaries and improving the pedagogy in those already established. Above all, the eighteenth-century
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French episcopate aimed to assert itself in both the 'national' and the European contexts: confronting, on the one hand, the Calvinists, who had remained in France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes; and on the other, the non-believers and proponents of the Enlightenment. These efforts would become decisive after 1770, as the bishops attempted to consolidate traditional Catholic forces in defence of the Christian faith and the political order, both of which were thought to be under threat. However, the bishops continued to have little regard during the century for the economic conditions of the lower clergy, a situation that would lead to an accumulation of hostility which exploded at the time of the Revolution.
The Italian bishops
As Claudio Donati has suggested, it is better to speak of the bishops of the different Italian states, than of 'the Italian bishops', even if the latter expression can legitimately be used to underline the exceptional relationship between the Italian 'church' and Rome.
There was a larger number of dioceses in Italy than in any other European region: eighteen, for example, in Tuscany; thirty-two under Venetian jurisdiction, and about 130 distributed throughout the Kingdom of Naples. The state's intervention in episcopal appointments in the Italian peninsula was similar to that in other European regions, although the array of specific practices was greater. These ranged from direct appointments by the sovereign in Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples, to the practice which prevailed elsewhere, where the pope was given the final choice from up to three candidates proposed by the local political authority.
The majority of the Italian bishops were drawn from the ranks of the secular clergy, from cathedral canons or vicars-general, most of whom held doctoral degrees. Only 15 to 30 per cent - especially those appointed by the papacy -came from the monastic and mendicant orders or from congregations of regular clerics such as the Theatines and the Barnabites, and most of these were destined for undistinguished sees. The growing aristocratic character of the episcopacy was most marked in the Duchy of Savoy, in Sardinia, in the Venetian Republic, and in Sicily. By contrast, only 30 per cent of prelates could claim noble birth in the Kingdom of Naples during the eighteenth century, and a similar trend towards 'bourgeois' bishops was to be found in Tuscany and Lombardy.
Despite the contradictory positions of Rome, which did not always favour the implementation of Tridentine discipline in the dioceses, the papacy's
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control over the Italian bishops was generally more direct than over the other European episcopacies. This authority had been achieved through the Congregation of the Council in 1564, and through the Congregation of bishops in 1571-72, later (in 1601) the Congregation of bishops and regular clergy. Papal authority was further strengthened through the ruling of Sixtus V in 1585, requiring Italian bishops to make regular ad limina visits to Rome every three years (every four years for bishops of other European countries) and deliver reports in person or via an intermediary on the state of their dioceses.
Despite these efforts, however, the early decades of the seventeenth century revealed substantial weaknesses on the part of both Rome and the Italian bishops, due in large measure to the growing expansion of the regular orders and difficult relations with the Inquisition. This situation would be resolved only slowly during the more secular period of the papacy, beginning with Innocent XI in 1676. The bishops' functions would be particularly extolled during the long pontificate of Benedict XIV (1740-58) who, inspired by the writings of Ludovico Antonio Muratori, sought to spread the model of a prelate who was not only a good diocesan administrator, but also a pastor capable of wise 'moderation' in civil and religious matters.
An anti-papal offensive led by various 'Enlightened' rulers of the peninsula began in the 1760s in Venice, Tuscany, Lombardy and Naples, an offensive which created a large degree of uncertainty among the bishops, especially after the expulsion of the Jesuits. The most advanced anti-Roman and pro-statist episcopalism occurred in Tuscany, with the ecclesiastical reforms of Peter Leopold and of Bishop Scipione de' Ricci of Pistoia and Prato, and with the unsuccessful attempt to create a 'national' church at the Pistoia synod of 1786. At the same time, however, a substantial pro-papal movement was emerging elsewhere within the Italian episcopate. A position in favour of pontifical primacy could be seen, in particular, among the bishops of the Papal States, the Kingdom of Sardinia, the Venetian Republic and the small states of the Po Valley, such as Parma and Modena. After the period of reform, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic period, this moderate 'Roman' majority would ensure a non-traumatic transformation from the 'Italian churches' of the ancien regime to the Italian church of the nineteenth century.
The bishops of the empire, the Habsburg domains, and Poland
In the territories of the empire, the Catholic Church was divided into an 'episcopal' Germany and a 'monastic' Germany, depending on the relative
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regional power of the bishops or the great abbots. 'Episcopal' Germany - which included some fifty of the sixty-seven dioceses where 'prince-bishops' reigned-was characterized by a large degree of autonomy from Rome and by a unity between political and religious structures which had endured for centuries. It covered a wide area in a mosaic of jurisdictions and ecclesiastical divisions, extending from the north-west to the south of Germany, and from the Rhine to Salzburg. Bishops, abbots, and priors all sat in the Imperial Diet, together with the princes and nobles from the minor dynasties and imperial cities. The great power of the bishops - all of noble birth and elected by the cathedral chapters -was increasingly marked by a sense of autonomy from Rome, especially after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The result was an ever stronger episcopalism, a position supported in the eighteenth century by the De statu ecclesiae (1763) of Justinus Febronius. At the same time, the region experienced a consolidation of certain secularization programmes, programmes that would be pursued during the Napoleonic occupation through to the dissolution of the ecclesiastic principalities.
While they remained active in both the religious life and the administration of their dioceses, the German bishops were also engaged in sponsoring the great architectural projects of Baroque Catholicism, ranging from churches and sanctuaries to secular buildings such as the palatial residence at Wiirzburg. Neither should one disregard the bishops' contributions to the figurative and musical arts of the age, of which prince-bishop Girolamo Colloredo's patronage of Mozart is only one example.
In east-central Europe, in the hereditary Habsburg domains and in the territories of the Bohemian and Hungarian thrones, the episcopacy strongly supported both the secular struggles against the Turks and the Protestants, and the creation of strong links between ecclesiastical institutions and the political power of the monarchy. Among the seventeenth-century bishops of the twelve dioceses in the hereditary domains, few made a markin the spiritual and religious sphere. The typical 'Baroque' Austrian bishop could hardly be described as 'Tridentine', given his aristocratic origins and his involvement in diplomatic and administrative tasks in the service of the Habsburgs. A new type of bishop began to emerge, however, during the period of reforms in the early to mid-eighteenth century. They revealed a curious mixture of influences, both from Trent (as seen in the bishops' frequent appeals to the Council), and from the Enlightenment (as seen in their opposition to traditional expressions of popular religion, in the name of a 'rational' Christianity). In general agreement with state policies, as embodied in the Concessus in Publico-Ecclesiasticis of 1769, the bishops opposed devotional practices judged to be superstitious, such
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as indulgences, processions, confraternities, and pilgrimages. The policies of Joseph II between 1780 and 1790 accentuated the statist characteristics of these reforms, but the bishops were not always united behind the decisions of this monarch. Even if they approved the suppression of monasteries, convents, and confraternities and the strengthening of parish life, they were opposed to any drastic interventions by the emperor in liturgical, religious or devotional practices, areas in which the state generally retreated after the death of Joseph II in 1790.
In a territory which contained such a patchwork of religions, comprising not only royal Hungary but also Transylvania and the so-called Triple Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia, the bishops assumed great cultural influence, especially after the Habsburg reconquest following the siege of Vienna in 1683. This was true partly because of their training which often took place at the German-Hungarian College in Rome; and partly because of the considerable political weight accrued from sitting ex officio in the upper House, where their allegiance to the reigning dynasty was conjoined with a solid feeling of Hungarian 'nationality'. In 1776 Maria Theresa responded to the growth of the population and pressure from Catholics by creating several new dioceses out of the primate's archdiocese of Esztergom. Other dioceses were established in the following years, reaching a total of twenty-one by the end of the century, a number largely in line with the standards of western Europe. Through its suppression of the institutions of the regular clergy, Josephism undoubtedly strengthened the dioceses and the parishes, especially in Hungary, but this trend was the result of the directives of the state, not of the bishops. Indeed, the reaction of the Hungarian nobles and peasants against the Josephist reforms was reinforced by a strong reaction of both the bishops and the church in general.
In the mid-seventeenth century the Polish-Lithuanian episcopate consisted of nineteen dioceses and the two archbishoprics of Gniezno (the primate's see) and Lwow All Catholic bishops were nominated by the king, as were those of both the Eastern Orthodox Church (with one metropolitan and six bishops) and the Greek Catholic 'Uniates' (with one metropolitan and seven bishops). The Roman bishops were chosenfrom the ranks ofthe lower nobility (szlachta), which also had a monopoly on the high offices and canonries of the cathedral chapters. But in other respects, their social and political positions were scarcely replicated in any other European country. Not only were they senators of the 'royal republic' (unlike the Uniate bishops), but their control of large estates assimilated them into the great land-owning classes. Their studies in Rome exposed them to western culture, while their links with the
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court, their familial relations, and their seats in the Senate all made them exponents of a 'national' church, a church which was very different from the other European churches, and which contrasted markedly with both German Protestantism and Russian Orthodoxy.
After the strong impact of the Tridentine reforms, inspired by Cardinal Hosius, the Archbishop of Warmia, the Polish bishops of the mid-seventeenth century had become profoundly different from their predecessors. Under the reign of Jan Sobieski (1674-96), the liberator of Vienna from the Turkish siege, the earlier crisis of revolts and wars seemed to come to an end. There followed a long constructive period, which facilitated a second phase of Tridentine reforms within the Polish episcopate, especially under the monarchs of the House of Saxony, Augustus II (1697-1733), and Augustus III (1733-63). In this climate, ecclesiastical culture appeared more sensitive to a particular kind of 'Catholic Enlightenment', supported by the bishops and by some religious orders such as the Jesuits and the Piarists. Renewed difficulties arose, however, in the later eighteenth century, with the suppression of the Society of Jesus, and with the political and constitutional crisis which led to the three successive territorial partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795.
The secular clergy in Spain and Portugal
By the end of the eighteenth century, the secular clergy of Spain totalled some 70,000 individuals out of a clerical population of 148,000 and a general population of 10.5 million. The majority of the seculars were concentrated in the cities, living largely from benefices or from bequests for Masses. To those clerics who had received sacerdotal ordination, must be added a 'clerical proletariat' who had only taken minor orders and who enjoyed privileges such as exemptions from taxes and from lay jurisdiction. Distributed irregularly through the vast peninsula, these clergymen originated predominantly from rural backgrounds and were of modest means. They were strongly integrated into Spanish society in terms of their standard of living, their family ties, and their highly localized sense of identity.
The ecclesiastical reforms initiated in the eighteenth century during the reign of Charles III did not substantially change the position of the secular clergy, especially those in the parishes -unlike the reforms in Habsburg Austria and Italy during roughly the same period. At the turn of the nineteenth century the defensive and theocratic vision which affected the episcopacy also had a strong impact on the lower clergy. This perspective would long influence the political, social, and religious characteristics of Spanish history.
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The make-up of the Portuguese secular clergy was similar to that of the Spanish, though the data available give conflicting results as to their numerical presence. Foreign travellers, generalizing from the situation observed in the cities, speak of a superabundance of clerics. But just as in Spain, the lower clergy was unevenly distributed. Not only were they concentrated in the urban centres of medium-to-large towns, but they were also more widespread in the north of the country than in areas of large estates in the south. It seems likely that the number of clergy in Portugal was reduced in the 1780s, as a result of the reformist activities of the minister Pombal. But these reforms did not directly affect the organization of the seculars. Their principal aim was the transformation of the religious orders, rather than the ecclesiastical society of the parishes. Thus, the Pombaline policies were more closely allied with those of the Spanish than with the reforms pursued by the Habsburgs.
The secular clergy in France
In the seventeenth century, the French secular clergy numbered approximately 100,000 out of a total of 18 million inhabitants, a number which would rise in the eighteenth century to approximately 130,000 out of 25 million. Despite the fact that the French parish priest was commonly appointed by an ecclesiastical or lay patron (and more rarely, by the bishop), and despite the considerable presence of chaplains and other priests without cure of souls who occasionally celebrated Mass, there was nonetheless a much enhanced awareness in France of the rights of the parish priests. Such rights had been strongly supported in 1611 by the Gallican author Richer. In addition, the dignity of the priesthood had been greatly exalted during the seventeenth century by Cardinal Berulle, Saint Francis de Sales, and Saint Vincent de Paul. Another characteristic of the French secular clergy was the strong presence of companies or congregations of priests, some of whom took simple vows. Examples of such congregations include the Fathers of Christian Doctrine (or the Doctrinaires) who appeared in Italy in 1560 and were established in France by Cesar de Bus; the French Oratory, created by Berulle in 1611 following the Italian model of Saint Philip Neri; the mission priests, or Lazarists, founded by Saint Vincent de Paul in 1625; the Congregations of Jesus and Mary, or Eudists, established in 1643 by Saint John Eudes; and the Sulpicians, founded in 1645 by Jean-Jacques Olier, the vicar of the large Parisian parish of Saint-Sulpice. The Sulpicians, the Oratorians and the Lazarists were all committed to teaching in the seminaries.
The French secular clergy of the seventeenth century clearly had its share of moral and disciplinary irregularities, as can be seen in the numerous abbes
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without cure of souls living mostly in the towns, or in the numbers of rural priests whose lifestyle was largely indistinguishable from that of the laity. However, notwithstanding such difficulties and compromises, the image and the reality of the 'good priest' had endured, reinforced by the newly developing theology of the priesthood, and by a Jansenist religious and moral vision. Such movements and traditions not only provided exemplary models of doctrine and personal piety for French ecclesiastics, but also fortified the bond between the priest and his parish community. At the same time, the lower clergy helped guarantee religious and civil commitment to both church and state via the regular readings from the pulpit of episcopal instructions and royal decrees.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, under the firm control of the bishops, the French secular clergy had been substantially reformed. But the century would also bring a series of ecclesiastical crises: first from the effects of the renewed condemnation of Jansenism in the bull Unigenitus (1713), and second from the decline in the number of sacerdotal ordinations in many areas of the country after 1760 - a decline due in part to the increasing secularization of society and the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas. At the same time, tensions were growing throughout the century between the lower clergy on the one hand (particularly the parish priests), and the bishops, canons, and religious orders, on the other. The existence of such tensions would help explain the position taken by the lower clergy in 1789.
The secular clergy in Italy
On the Italian peninsula the post-Tridentine bishops were particularly concerned with the excessive numbers of the secular clergy. Seminaries, created to train and improve clerical behaviour, operated only irregularly and for short periods. The attention of both ecclesiastical and lay authorities was focused primarily on the necessity of controlling the great numbers of clergymen, particularly in southern Italy. The principal causes of this plethora of clerics were economic and social. But the particular institution of the 'ricettizio' system, present in up to 70 per cent of parishes in the southern provinces, also contributed. In these parishes, the care of souls was collective, delegated by the capitular body to a vicar-curate, who was chosen from within the local chapter. The chapter would then give its 'ricetto' ('reception' or 'shelter') to all clerics originating from the parish, priests and tonsured clerics alike, according to well-defined rules. Strong local and family interests, and the lay patronage of oligarchal groups, meant that this system was both autonomous and well-integrated within southern Italian society. Not only did this institution lead
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to the creation of an overly large secular clergy, who were mostly uninvolved in the parish ministry, but it also obstructed the pastoral work of the post-Tridentine prelates. The bishops of the different Italian states in the second half of the seventeenth century sought less to reduce the number of ordinations, than to reorder the clergy and guide clerics towards the major orders. This process was facilitated by pastoral policies under the pontificates of Innocent XI and Innocent XII, which broke new ground for the Catholic Church in Italy, by defining the public face of secular ecclesiastical institutions and religious life in the peninsula for at least the first fifty years of the eighteenth century.
Throughout these years, the age of Muratori and Benedict XIV, a spirit of reform continued to permeate ecclesiastical structures from top to bottom. But in the second half of the century this process was interrupted, or at least greatly slowed by the church's hardening position in the face of Enlightenment culture and the beginnings of Enlightened reforms. Political authorities took increasingly radical initiatives against the institutions of the church, in particular with the Habsburg reformism of Joseph II and his brother Peter Leopold (the future emperor Leopold II). Within the framework of these reforms, the number of secular clergymen was dramatically reduced. In Austrian Lom-bardy which was one of the territories where Josephism was put to the test, the clergy as a whole experienced a massive reduction of 57 per cent between 1772 and 1792. Although less drastic than Josephism, the policies of Peter Leopold also made considerable modifications to the regular and secular ecclesiastical institutions in Tuscany, leading to an 8 per cent reduction in the ecclesiastical population between 1765 and 1782.
At the other end of the peninsula in the Kingdom of Naples, the Bourbon ecclesiastical reforms, like those of the Habsburgs, did not set the problem of clerical training and the definition of a new clerical profile as the first priority. Nonetheless, the Bourbons did institute policies to control the numbers of the secular clergy, which underwent a gradual but notable reduction from about 56,000 to 36,000 between 1765-66 and 1801, a 35 per cent reduction in a little less than forty years.
The secular clergy in central and eastern Europe
The Catholic re-conquest of the Habsburg territories was directed essentially by the religious orders, in particular by the Jesuits and Capuchins, who were favoured not only by the Habsburg authorities in Austria and Bohemia, but also by the bishops themselves. These two orders were supported because of their pastoral work and their preaching, deemed particularly valuable in the
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face of an extremely poor parochial organization. In Bohemia, the religious orders were also important as a consequence of particular historical conditions linked to the seventeenth-century re-conquest. It was within this framework that Joseph II began his reforms of the secular parish clergy, providing the parish priests with an annual stipend paid for from the assets of the Jesuits and other religious orders which had been suppressed. In Hungary, as well, Josephism had a decisive effect, leading to the suppression of 134 monasteries of the contemplative orders. Under state control, the income gained from these suppressions was used to create a thousand new parishes, while clergymen from the suppressed religious orders were secularized and used for parish service.
The secular clergy in the Polish-Lithuanian region was touched by less dramatic transformations than in the Habsburg lands. Here the accumulation of benefices and the non-residence of priests in their parishes would continue to characterize the secular clergy in a parochial framework, where the patronage and appointment of priests belonged to the nobility in 80 to 90 per cent of the 5,000 existing parishes. However, one element which distinguished the secular Roman Catholic clergy of Poland from that in other western and east-central European countries was the stability of the ecclesiastical population, which remained close to 10,000 or 11,000 throughout the two centuries from the Council of Trent to the partition of Poland. In this sense, the Catholic seculars closely resembled the 10,000 married priests of the Uniate Church, apart from the different rites used and the greater poverty and lower educational level of the Uniate clergy.
The regular clergy in Spain and Portugal
The question of the numbers of the regular clergy remained a controversial problem in Spain throughout the modern age. The most notable increase in the regulars had occurred between the end of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth, especially with the establishment of the Capuchins, the Jesuits, the Hospitallers, and later the Piarists. At the same time there was an increase in the number of mendicant convents, while the Benedictine orders remained largely constant. The new religious impulse of the age, the generosity of certain members of the nobility, rivalries between different communities known for their large memberships, and the piety of the rulers: all contributed to this increase in numbers. Even in 1787, after the expulsion of the Jesuits, there were still over 52,000 religious in 2,067 convents throughout the kingdom.
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The members of the mendicant orders generally came from the middle to lower classes of Spanish society, since entry into these orders did not require proof of nobility, but only evidence of limpieza de sangre. Individuals of aristocratic origins tended to gravitate towards the monastic orders and, in particular, towards the Hieronymites. The regular Spanish clergy was perhaps best typified by the lively body of Franciscan friars, who were thriving according to the 1787 census, with a total of 15,000 members inhabiting 700 of the 2,000 convents of male religious still in existence at that time. Another important group, especially in Castile, were the discalced or 'barefoot' religious, who followed a severe rule within the various orders. These included, in addition to the discalced Franciscans, the Carmelites, the Augustinians, the Trinitarians, and the Mercedarians. Such movements often provoked strong tensions within the original orders, as can be seen in certain Carmelite monasteries linked to the figures of Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross.
The Society ofjesus deserves a separate discussion. Its expansionin Spain was impressive and by the reigns of Philip III and Philip IV its numerous religious houses held some 2,000 members. However, relations between the Jesuits and the other religious orders - and in particular with the influential Dominicans -were not always cordial. But whether Jesuits or Dominicans, Augustinians or Carmelites, the regulars succeeded in creating a 'Spanish model' of religious and spiritual culture which by the early seventeenth century had established itself throughout the whole of Europe and beyond - before being overtaken and eventually giving way to a 'French model'.
The central crisis for the regular clergy in eighteenth-century Spain would come with the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. The members of this order were subjected to a highly secular polemic regarding their moral doctrines, the presumed or real extent of their wealth, and their missionary methods in the colonial territories. Their expulsion accentuated a widespread hostility against the monastic orders in general. Only the mendicant orders seemed not to have experienced such traumatic effects, thanks to their wide popularity in Iberian society.
The female convents, which numbered approximately 1,000 in the 1787 census and contained some 25,000 religious, were mostly 'open' institutions, in which post-Tridentine cloistered life was either not practised at all, or only practised with difficulty. The majority of these convents were controlled by their respective male orders. But in addition to the women religious, a phenomenon particular to Spain was the presence of the beaterios, groups of unmarried women and widows living as a community within the parish, and governed by the Augustinián rule. The concept of a 'less regular' religious life
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would often provoke suspicion on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities. Yet intense manifestations of piety and devotion flourished in both the observant and discalced monasteries and in the beaterios, a piety that would profoundly mark female religiosity (and general religious practice) in Spain during the modern age.
The regular clergy in Portugal, like the seculars, was very similar to that in Spain, notwithstanding some important differences. Detailed enumerations reveal that the number of Portuguese religious houses rose from 477 in 1739 to 493 in 1765. By the latter period there was a total of 42,200 regulars (30,772 male religious and 11,428 female). In any case it is certain that the reforms introduced by Pombal's government in the mid-eighteenth century had a strong positive impact on the organization of the Portuguese regular clergy - especially by comparison with the more tentative contemporary efforts carried out in Spain. The reforming efforts in Portugal culminated with two royal decrees issued in 1782 and 1788, one forbidding the establishment of new orders, and the other requiring the authority of the sovereign for admission to a religious order.
The regular clergy in France
With the end of the wars of religion in France, there was a strong revival of the regular orders. In the early 1600s, even before the bishops' reforms of the secular ecclesiastical structures, a vast movement of French 'reforms' swept through the older religious orders and monastic congregations, with profound repercussions not only for religious life in France, but in all of Europe. A general tendency towards the centralization of existing institutions through a system of federal connections was initiated among the Benedictines. The first community to undergo such transformations was the congregation of Saint-Vanne and Saint-Hydulphe in 1604. This occurred in Lorraine, in an area of strong friction between Catholics and Protestants, and thereafter it spread through France. These regulars went on to found the Congregation of Saint-Maur. By the end of the seventeenth century the reforming process had advanced so far that very few French Benedictine monasteries were still linked to the ancient and formerly glorious abbey of Cluny.
Outside the Benedictine world, in the first three decades of the 1600s waves of reform also permeated those institutions which lived according to the Augus-tinian rule, through a revival of the congregations of regular canons. These included the Union, or the congregation of regular canons of Our Saviour in Lorraine (Le Sauveuf), established by Saint Pierre Faurier and approved by Rome in 1628; and the congregation of Premontres or Norbertines,
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reorganized in Lorraine, in 1630, and rapidly spreading not only in France, but in Bohemia and Poland as well, where they gave assistance to the parish clergy.
The mendicant orders appear somewhat more removed from these reforming impulses, with the notable exception of the Carmelites. The decalced reforms of Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross were welcomed in France with the establishment in 1611 of a male branch of the Carmelites, a group which would have a profound effect on religious life in France in the seventeenth century.
Already 'reformed', so to speak, were those new congregations of regular and secular clerics, such as the Jesuits and the Oratorians, who arrived and spread through France between the second half of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth. The Jesuits were long opposed by the universities, the parlements, and the bishops who defended the Gallican traditions. The Oratorians, by contrast, were more readily integrated into French society.
However, despite their active presence, the religious orders in France would never assume the role they acquired in Spain, Italy, and those areas which experienced a Catholic re-conquest in the Habsburg monarchy and Poland. The French church was never dominated by religious orders - notwithstanding the major contributions of certain eminent individuals and reformed congregations. It was rather a church dominated by bishops and the secular clergy, and by those previously mentioned companies or congregations of priests who were dedicated to parish and missionary work. If anything, the impact of the French religious orders would be felt primarily outside Europe, where the work of the Capuchins, Dominicans, and Carmelites in the Levant; of the Jesuits in Canada and China; and of the priests of the Missions étrangeres from 1664 onwards, would contribute to furthering the diffusion of Catholic Christianity and promoting a French presence in the Near and Far East and the New World.
A particularity of religiosity in France can be seen in the new engagement of women in religious life and society, in a context which was more dynamic than that of either Spain or Italy. In the course of the seventeenth century, women were able to choose an active religious and social mission within the framework of open congregations with simple vows which sprang up during the century. Such congregations included the Daughters of Charity, founded in 1634 by Saint Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac, and the congregation of Notre Dame, under the Augustinián rule. The latter was launched in Lorraine by Saint Pierre Faurier and Mother Alix Le Clerc in 1597, and quickly spread throughout France, serving primarily in the education of middle-class girls.
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Active in preaching, popular missions, social welfare, and teaching, the male religious orders had about 25,000 members in 1768, living in 2,966 houses, monasteries, and convents. In that year a royal commission on the regular clergy began a series of investigations which would continue through to 1780, leading to a renewed dynamism for the regulars in the fields of education and teaching. The schools of the Christian Brothers, which had been founded by Jean-Baptiste de La Salle between 1694 and 1705 and were formally approved in 1725-26, flourished under this new impulse. Even if no systematic reforms took place in France in the later eighteenth century, there was nonetheless a consistent reduction in the numbers belonging to the male religious orders: from the some 25,000 in 1768 to slightly more than 16,000 in 1789, with a particularly large drop of 40 per cent among the Franciscans, and a more moderate decline of 27 per cent among the female orders. The structural weaknesses of the regulars, combined with an ever more pervasive hostility towards them in public opinion, would lead to their suppression by the French National Assembly in the early years of the Revolution.
The regular clergy in Italy
In the face of the relative weakness of the secular ecclesiastical structure in Italy, it was the religious orders that ensured the success of the Counter-Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The development of the regulars was overseen by the Roman Curia through a congregation of the regular clergy in 1596, a congregation of bishops and regular clergy in 1601, and a congregation on regular discipline in 1598. It was also expedited by a series of privileges granted by two popes who had come from the ranks of the regular clergy: the Dominican Pius V (1566-72) and the Franciscan Sixtus V (1585-90). From the early 1600s onwards, the enormous expansion of the regular clergy in Italy brought negative consequences for their discipline. As a result, Rome began an investigation of the numbers and wealth of the religious orders in 1649 and initiated a series of reforms which would also benefit the secular ecclesiastical structure.
The data gathered at this time by the investigating commission reveal the extraordinary extent of the network of regulars in Italy. Not including monasteries and friars in Sardinia and Corsica and the congregations of the Ora-torians and Lazarists, there were almost 70,000 religious distributed in 6,238 convents and colleges. Sixty-three per cent of the religious and 65 per cent of the institutions were situated in the Papal States, the vice-royalty of Naples,
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and Sicily. Some 1,513 monasteries and convents were suppressed in the first wave of reforms, but by 1654, when the commission completed its work, the Franciscans had already regained 200 convents out of the 442 which had been suppressed, while the Hermits of Saint Augustine had regained 123 out of 342. A total of 323 institutions had thus reopened. This rapid rebound of the regulars came both from pressure exerted by the orders themselves and from requests made by local authorities, arguing the usefulness of the 'conventini' (little convents) for pastoral service in inaccessible and isolated places, as small hospices for pilgrims and travellers, and as therapeutic centres where exorcist friars operated.
Developing in parallel to these reforms were initiatives which applied the recommendations of the Council of Trent to the female convents. The cornerstone of these reforms was the financial reorganization of the convents and the imposition of the cloister for all nuns who had made solemn vows. The latter transformation was particularly difficult, due to the resistance of the nuns themselves and their families, especially in the noble convents. But economic improvements were also difficult to achieve. The administration of the convents was reorganized, and many were changed into schools for girls, a process which was explicitly ratified in the eighteenth century by Leopold's reforms in Tuscany.
Rome would return to the reform of the male orders after 1694 during the pontificate of Innocent XII through the establishment of another commission for regular discipline. But once again the different orders succeeded in blocking the reforms, and in 1695 they even achieved a de facto suppression of the maximum number of entries, which had been in force for forty years. As a consequence there would be a continuing rise in the number of regulars throughout the first half of the eighteenth century.
The ecclesiastical reforms of Habsburg Enlightened despotism were particularly successful with regard to the regular clergy. In Josephist Lombardy the 291 male monasteries and convents which existed in 1767-72 would be reduced to 200 by 1790-92, while the total number of regulars was reduced by 74 per cent. A similar trend may be found for the female convents, which were reduced from 164 in 1771 to only sixty-seven by 1790. In the Tuscany of Peter Leopold, 130 monasteries and convents out of 345 disappeared between 1765 and 1789, with a total reduction in the religious population of 43 per cent. Here too the female religious orders underwent an even more dramatic reduction, with the 237 convents existing in 1765 declining to 128 by 1768. In the meantime the number of 'veiled' nuns was almost cut in half: from 5,141 in 1767 to 2,670 in 1782.
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In the absence of an overall plan, the Bourbon reforms in the Kingdom of Naples primarily affected the widespread Franciscan community, which made up more than 28 per cent of the entire male regular clergy in the realm. Various other suppressive measures were adopted after 1783 as part of the reconstruction of those areas following the terrible earthquake which had devastated Calabria and as a result of other more general political and socioeconomic trends in southern Italy. In the end, the population of regular male clergy in the Mezzogiorno declined from about 30,000 individuals in 1765-66 to about 17,000 in 1801, a 44 per cent drop in thirty-five years. But Bourbon reformism was more hesitant with regard to the female orders. Between 1766 and 1787 the monastic population of this sector fell by only 16 per cent -from 22,828 to 18,777. The numbers of women religious would remain at approximately this level until the French occupation of the kingdom in 1801.
The regular clergy in the Habsburg domains and in Poland
In the hereditary Habsburg domains the contemplative orders, the mendicant orders, and the congregations of regular clergy had all played a role in the Catholic re-conquest of territories which had been lost to the Turks or to the Protestant Reformations. Perhaps more than any other groups, it was the Jesuits and the Capuchins who effectively embodied Austrian Catholicism: the Jesuits, with their schools and colleges at Vienna, Graz, Klagenfurt, and Innsbruck, but also with cultural and religious outposts in Wittelsbach Bavaria and the Catholic areas of the Holy Roman Empire; the Capuchins, with their aggressive missions active in the most difficult moments of the fight against Protestantism and, above all, against the Ottoman Empire. The situation in Bohemia was similar, where the Jesuits were solidly entrenched after the re-conquest, with eight colleges and eight residences, and where the Capuchins could claim thirty convents by 1782.
In Hungary and the Triple Kingdom the religious orders were more varied. Here at the time of the Josephist suppressions, there were some 152 male monasteries and convents with a total of 3,234 religious, to which could be added an additional twenty-five convents and monasteries in Transylvania. The majority of the male regulars belonged to the eighty-four Franciscan institutions, but twenty-five were in Jesuit houses, and another twenty-four belonged to the Piarists. In Hungary, in particular, Josephism would take a heavy toll on this clergy, with the suppression in 1781 of 134 male and female houses, with the expulsion of 1,484 male religious and 190 female religious, and
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with the transfer of the buildings and revenues of these orders to the secular clergy.
However, it was in the Habsburg hereditary domains that the Josephist suppressions of the regular clergy took on paradigmatic significance. A relatively short span of time saw the disappearance of some 700 male and female institutions, so that the population of the regular clergy was reduced from 65,000 to 27,000. The buildings and revenues of the suppressed religious orders were used not only for the secular clergy, but also for the needs of the general public. In addition, those regular clergy who had escaped suppression were redeployed into 'public service' positions. In sum then, in the space of only a few years, Josephism produced a veritable 'revolutionary' upheaval over a vast area where the Counter-Reformation and the religious and social forces which embodied it had once been so strong.
In Poland in the mid-sixteenth century, there had been fourteen monastic and mendicant male orders, and eight female orders. Over time other orders and congregations originating in Spain and Italy were also established, as well as the Lazarists who had come from France. A substantial increase occurred in the 1620s and 1630s, when another 250 houses were added to the 277 already in existence. Two-thirds of these belonged to mendicant orders, such as the Dominicans and the reformed observant Franciscans. The Jesuits were also particularly successful, their initial twenty-five colleges and residences expanding to forty-two by 1626, while the Jesuit corps of 512 members grew to nearly a thousand.
In the second half of the seventeenth century, despite the general political and social crisis that beset the country, another seven male religious orders were added to those already in existence, bringing the total number to twenty-seven - or twenty-eight if the Basilian Order, the only religious order of the Uniate Church, is included (whose male branch numbered in the eighteenth century over a thousand, distributed in 191 monasteries). Older religious orders like the Capuchins, and new congregations such as the Lazarists and the Bartholomists, found a prominent role as educators in the seminaries. The increase in the male religious orders would continue uninterrupted into the second half of the eighteenth century, through the first partition of Poland in 1772, when there were 14,600 religious in 860 institutions - a number which was equivalent, or perhaps even superior, to the numbers of the secular clergy. Unlike other areas of Catholic Europe, over 60 per cent of Polish religious were ordained priests, a factor which facilitated the pastoral work and ministry of the regulars and which probably explains the relatively few instances of indiscipline among the regular clergy, especially by comparison with other parts of Europe.
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The female religious orders in Poland followed a similar upward trajectory, though the increases were not so dramatic. To the ninety-five houses in existence by the mid-seventeenth century, sixteen were added during the second half of the century, and a further thirty-two in the first half of the eighteenth century. These orders were eminently practical in their orientation. They included the Ursulines, known for their teaching, the Sisters of Mercy, who cared for the sick, and the Sisters of the Life of Mary, who originated in Lithuania and were established in 1737-39 with the aim of converting Jewish women and neophytes.
The first serious blow to the organization of the regular clergy was the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773, an event which had an especially grave impact on teaching institutions in Poland - even though the Jesuits survived without papal sanction in the then Polish territories of Byelorussia. Further damage was inflicted in the 1780s by the Josephist suppressions in Galicia, which had been awarded to Austria in the first partition. As a result, the population of the regular male clergy was reduced by a quarter and the female religious by a third from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. But, although much reduced, the regular orders continued to play a prominent role during the century and a half when Poland disappeared from the map. Both regulars and seculars would profoundly stamp the religious life of the country, creating a model of Catholicism which was both similar to and distinct from the models found in the other nations of Europe. (Translation by Guyda Armstrong and Timothy Tackett)
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The Protestant clergies in the European world
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The Reformation had radically altered the religious role and social standing of the clergy. The Protestant Reformers insisted on a general priesthood of believers, though it was rarely realized, and they rejected the view that ordination was a sacrament. Despite the apparent reduction in status this implied, the Protestant clergies remained a privileged body through the symbolism of their ordination, their university education, and their links by marriage with the ever-emerging middle classes. Their domestic arrangements helped to define religious and social respectability within the community, as they performed their role as the godly head of their household. In Zurich they modelled appropriate behaviour and piety as a reflection of the authoritarian state, while Toby Barnard notes that the Anglican parsonages of eighteenth-century Ireland were to be 'miniature godly commonwealths'. The reformers' ideal for an educated parish ministry was eventually achieved, but the process was a long drawn-out and complex affair. As with cultural change more generally in early modern Europe, the influence of tradition and the constant interplay between ideals and reality were often more important than revolutionary changes.
Between 1660 and 1780, the confessional rancour of the previous century gradually subsided and the Enlightenment exerted a moderating influence upon European religious life. The churches of Europe began to consolidate their position within society and in Protestant countries the general understanding of the status and function of the clergy outlined above was widely understood. Yet it is clear that the Protestant clergies of Europe between 1660 and 1780 must be described in the plural. Economic, geographical, and cultural differences shaped the type of minister called to a particular parish or church and how he was likely to approach his pastoral role. Different types of church organization, or ecclesiology also influenced how a clergyman related to his congregation and what he felt able or unable to do. The nature of the state and the power relationships therein determined the precise associationbetween the secular authorities and the clergy in matters such as appointment, promotion,
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education, and income. Matters were further complicated by the remnants of a ramshackle medieval system that bequeathed to established churches perennial problems regarding property rights and ownership of parish income. In countries such as Sweden, England, the Netherlands and numerous German states, the parish structure formed the basis of political and social organization and the prime means of Christianizing the people, thus providing the formal context in which a minister did his job. The position of voluntary and persecuted Protestant churches was more complex and led to a considerable degree of uncertainty as to the function and status of their clerical leaders. In areas where Protestants faced determined persecution, such as in France and Hungary, the authority of the clergy was seriously weakened and their power within the church was increasingly delegated to the laity.
Theological developments also shaped the Protestant clergies both in terms of how they saw their calling and the content and style of their preaching. Amongst more advanced sections of the clergy in this period, there was a drift from lengthy doctrinal sermons to lighter homilies that stressed morality and the common good. On the other hand, traditionalists and evangelicals sought to counter the influence of moral preaching either by focusing upon confessional orthodoxy or preaching personal salvation through Christ alone. The latter was a prominent feature of the Protestant revival in its Pietist and evangelical forms. The revival emerged in the face of Habsburg persecution and was shaped by social changes associated with the movement of populations, problems caused by urban growth and the early Industrial Revolution. As far as the spiritual life of the Protestant churches was concerned, the revival inculcated a more zealous and active commitment to the Christian faith that exercised a profound influence upon how many ministers understood and practised their vocation. The leading Lutheran Pietist, Philipp Jakob Spener, was concerned that the ministry was seen as merely an arm of the state and irrelevant to the everyday lives of the laity. Spener was a committed Lutheran pastor who wanted to reform the Church by reminding ministers of their pastoral responsibilities and realizing the priesthood of all believers through small fellowship groups. Though religious revival began as a means of self-preservation amongst persecuted Protestant minorities in eastern and central Europe, it became an indispensable pastoral strategy in the west. As social and economic change challenged how the church would minister to the surrounding population, evangelism and pastoral care became more important than the maintenance of confessional structures. At the same time as they intensified the sense of divine calling amongst the clergy they influenced, Pietism and evangelicalism also challenged the established status of the clergy
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by increasing the self-confidence of the laity and producing new denominations such as Methodism and Moravianism with their own distinctive, and protean, understandings of the ministry. The period between 1660 and 1780 therefore saw the emergence of a significant challenge to the religious and social status of the established Protestant clergies.
With this broader context in mind, this chapter examines the structures and experiences of the Protestant clergies of Europe in the decades between 1660 and 1780 and considers how their position in church and society developed over time. The five sections of this chapter examine key aspects of clerical life: social background, education, methods of appointment and subsequent career patterns, income levels, and status within the state and local community. A recurring theme will be whether or not the Protestant clergies can be described as a professional group during this period. It will become obvious that the early modern Protestant clergy were in an ambiguous position, poised between a traditional understanding of their calling and place within parish communal life, and an emerging sense of being members of a separate occupational group.
Social background
Compiling a collective prosopographical profile of the early modern Protestant clergy is almost an impossibility given the wide geographical and cultural variations between states and territories. This problem is further compounded by the conflicting conclusions that historians have drawn from the available evidence. Nevertheless, clerical recruitment did reflect the social and cultural characteristics of the society from which recruits came and it is possible to point to some general features. The Protestant clergies were predominately drawn from the middling or lower-middling ranks of society (sizeable farmers and the urban middle classes) with few noblemen or peasants amongst their number. As Nigel Aston points out, men decided to become clergymen for a variety of reasons, including personal religious commitment, hopes among younger sons for status and decent incomes, desire to continue a family tradition, and the prospects for social advancement. Over time, there was an increase in the proportion of clerics who were themselves sons of clergymen, which led to a process of self-recruitment amongst the Protestant clergies. In both the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the sons of clergymen provided the largest contingent of pastors in Württemberg, supplying respectively 63 per cent and 44 per cent of the manpower. By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, over a third of all Lutheran clergymen in German territories were
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the sons of pastors; in the years between 1680 and 1740 the proportion in Sweden was between 40 and 45 per cent. The social origins of the lower clergy of the Diocese of London during the eighteenth century conformed to this pattern: clergy 35.4 per cent; professions 30.6 per cent; plebeians 19.4 per cent; landed gentry i2.4per cent; lesser nobility 1.2 per cent; schoolmasters 1 per cent. More generally in the Church of England the social status of recruits began to rise from the 1720s, owing to the increasing cost of university education and the pattern of self-recruitment. Though self-recruitment was important, studies that draw their examples from urban areas in Germany show that the clergy were just one part of the broader educated middle classes in urban areas, associated with legally trained office-holders in the state. Their position in this social group was consolidated through intermarriage that provided a ready-made structure for social and financial advancement.
It wouldbe misleading to assume that the urban middle classes monopolized recruitment to the ranks of the Protestant clergy. Nicholas Hope has observed that after 1700 the majority of the Lutheran clergy of the German states and Scandinavia came from 'clergy families, better-off peasant farmers, the crafts, and a few civil servant families'. Both the lower and higher clergy were of 'extremely modest social background'. This accounts for the patterns of preferment and the provisions made for old age, as, for example, when a new incumbent would marry the widow or daughter of his predecessor in order to secure his financial future through the continuous occupation of the rectory and glebe. In Brandenburg-Prussia, 98 per cent of the clergy of the Lutheran state church were of 'rural commoner origin', while the remaining 2 per cent were from the lesser gentry. More significantly, the social backgrounds of nearly half the clergy in this region were not recorded, which suggests that their fathers may have been either artisans or peasants. The continued centrality of agriculture to the early modern economy was also reflected in patterns of recruitment in other areas. Given the minority status of the Anglican population in Ireland, the established church clung tightly to the Protestant state and local landed society. This link was reinforced by the lay appropriation of tithes and marriage patterns that resulted in, for instance, sixty-eight of the 118 beneficed clergymen in County Down either originating from landed society or marrying into it. In the Presbyterian-dominated northeast, of the 619 ministers who served the Synod of Ulster in the eighteenth century, 71 per cent were sons of farmers, 20 per cent sons of clergy, 4 per cent sons of merchants, 1 per cent of others, while 4 per cent were of unknown origin. It is clear from this summary that the clergy did not come from either the highest or lowest social groups within society but from the middling ranks
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broadly conceived. Yet, the social complexion of the clergy depended to a large degree upon the local economic and cultural circumstances from which it was derived.
Education
An educated ministry was an indispensable requirement for the Protestant churches of Europe. The clergy were not there simply to perform rituals but to teach God's word, and to teachit well they mustbe educated. The Reformers had achieved much by the early seventeenth century. By 1600 only a quarter of the pastors in Mecklenburg had no academic training while in England three-quarters of the clergy in most areas were graduates by the 1640s. The figures were higher in more solidly Calvinist areas. By 1619, 94 per cent of ministers in the Palatinate had a formal education in theology, while in the Netherlands a mere 1 per cent were not suitably qualified by 1630. The ideal was, however, prone to lapse in periods of civil strife, no more so than in England during the 1640s and 1650s. In the Canterbury diocese, 87 per cent of the clergy were graduates in 1637, but the proportion fell to only 66 per cent by 1662. Thereafter, the educational attainments of the Church of England clergy improved, and most English and Welsh dioceses required evidence of a university education prior to ordination. This did not mean that all ordinands had to be graduates and in more remote areas a graduate ministry could be rare; for example, only 5.9 per cent of the clergy resident in the diocese of St David's in Wales between 1750 and 1800 held degrees. Amongst non-established Protestant denominations, the ideal of an educated ministry was maintained with arguably more enthusiasm though possibly with less effect in some cases. One of the most successful examples was the Synod of Ulster, founded in 1690. Following the practice in Presbyterian Scotland, the Synod from the last decade of the seventeenth century demanded that their candidates for the ministry be graduates and in 1702 it was resolved that no man be entered for trials unless he had studied divinity for four years after he had graduated.
Unsurprisingly, the clergy of the state churches studied in the universities of their homeland. In central Europe, fifteen of the twenty-nine territorial universities were Lutheran, and this was repeated in Scandinavia and the Baltic region with such foundations as Copenhagen, Uppsala and Dorpat. Theology students also comprised the largest grouping within the student body and the church continued to exercise a significant influence upon the lives of ministerial students. Tubingen in south-west Germany had twice as many theology students as any other faculty and no less than a third of these
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had to take jobs outside of the church due to an oversupply of candidates. Even after university training replaced the education received in diocesan secondary schools in Sweden in the 1650s, the local diocese continued to supervise the education received at university. The clergy of the established churches of England and Ireland were educated respectively at Oxford and Cambridge and at Trinity College, Dublin. While at university, these students for the Anglican ministry had the opportunity to mingle with gentry and to establish contacts that would become indispensable when they eventually sought a parish.
Though the geographical mobility of students had decreased since the early seventeenth century, many students for the ministry continued to receive their education outside of their country of birth. According to W R. Ward, Slovaks travelled to Jena, Germans to England and the Netherlands, the Swiss to Saumur, Heidelberg, Herbon, Leiden and Franeker, Hungarian Lutherans to Wittenberg and their Reformed countrymen to the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Oxford. Exclusion from territorial universities and active harassment meant tolerated Dissenters and persecuted Protestants had to seek their education elsewhere. In their quest to maintain the ideal of an educated ministry, English Old Dissent established their own academies. Over time these foundations encouraged the dilution of doctrinal conservatism that in turn was countered by the establishment of a number of evangelical academies from the 1730s. Despite their importance to the emergence of Dissent, these academies varied greatly in size and in the standard of education they offered. Other Dissenters and persecuted groups were forced to receive their training in other countries. Owing to their exclusion from Trinity College, Dublin, Presbyterians of Ulster were forced to travel to Scotland, particularly Glasgow, to receive a university education. In the Habsburg lands, the need to travel abroad was imperative, though it did have the advantage of establishing international links. For the Hungarian Reformed Church in particular, these links were forged early and maintained throughout the period. Special bursaries were formed for Hungarian students and the colleges at Sarospatak, Nargyenyed, and Debrecen received foreign endowment. Prospective French Protestant ministers were also forced by persecution to find opportunities for education abroad, establishing, with the surreptitious help of Benedict Picet of Geneva, a seminary at Lausanne that functioned from 1727 to 1809.
The education and training of ministers did not end with their attendance at university, as church authorities continued to supervise them to ordination. The supervision of candidates for the ministry provided by hierarchical church structures was less intensive than that provided by Presbyterianism. In the churches of England and Ireland ordination examinations were usually less
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than demanding, and in some German states examination by the consistory was a mere formality once a patron had appointed the candidate to a church living, though this did not necessarily mean that he was unfit to do the job. In Presbyterian churches, presbyteries and ministerial conferences known as privy censures were better suited to ensure standards were maintained and to foster a sense of group identity. The imposition of bishops in Scotland by the Stuart monarchs between 1660 and 1690 did not entirely dismantle the Presbyterian system. After Presbyterianism was fully re-established in 1690, the examination by presbytery of students for the ministry (known as 'trials') was established by an act of the Scottish General Assembly in 1698. The Scottish model was predictably adopted in Ulster where, despite harassment by the Anglican authorities between 1660 and 1690, Presbyterians maintained a careful system of oversight by the presbytery, though in order to escape the notice of the state, the time and place of ordinations were kept from the congregation. In 1672, the general committee drafted an extensive list of regulations for trials and ordinations. The trials could extend over a period of seven months and encompassed the following elements: popular sermons; set exercises, known as 'common heads', on various themes such as Protestant tenets, Presbyterian principles, polemics and pastoral issues; disputations; an explanation of contradictions in Scripture; and examinations in foreign languages, history, and theology. With some modifications, the system would remain substantially the same in the following century. In 1770, a series of five regulations concerning the licensing and training of ministers was passed by the Synod of Ulster to ensure that candidates remained in university for at least four years. The regulations stipulated that candidates should attend natural and moral philosophy classes and were to be examined by the presbytery in science, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, logic, metaphysics, natural and moral philosophy, theology and church history. These examinations were spread over three meetings of presbytery, though if the candidate had attended university for four years only one meeting was necessary.
The subjects chosen for study demonstrate the extent to which Protestant clergies across Europe were shaped by the values and priorities of the times. The desired education for ministers reflected both the concerns of the Enlightenment and the desirability of a classical education. These regulations also hint at the disparity, sometimes great, between the theory and practice of ministerial education and preparation. For whatever reason, by the early eighteenth century in Scotland there was little insistence by church authorities upon attendance at divinity classes. An act of the General Assembly in 1711 further complicated matters by stipulating that ministers ought to study
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divinity for six years upon graduation. However, this did not mean full-time attendance at university but private study under the control of the presbytery, during which time probationers taught in parish schools to secure an income. The need of students to do so highlights the financial burden of a university education. Students from modest backgrounds could simply not afford to attend university for long periods of time. As Hope demonstrates, there was a considerable difference in Lutheran Germany between a gifted and well-connected elite who received an education of between five and ten years, and a poor ordinand who could expect at most two years of theological education on a course that was itself dependent on the whim of the lecturer.
With the exception of the Presbyterian churches in Scotland and Ireland, most European Protestant churches did not insist on demonstrated theological competence as a necessary qualification for new clergy. As noted, the Church of England only required evidence of a university education in the arts as a qualification for the ministry. The number of theology degrees held by Lutheran pastors remained small until well into the seventeenth century. In addition, there was a definite hierarchy in the type of qualification one could expect. Masters degrees were given to urban ministers (or graduates of Tubingen) and doctorates to superintendents or court preachers. When theological education was offered, it reflected the values of the church authorities and the often-outdated confessional politics that arose after the Council of Trent. Yet the so-called Lutheran scholasticism this produced had been weakened during the seventeenth century by the influence of Reformed theology and the development of a more spiritual and devotional approach, which laid the basis for the triumph of Pietist pastoral theology. These developments have led Nicholas Hope rightly to caution against overstating the 'coercive power' of theology. Most ordinands in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries preferred 'customary and pastoral' rather than controversial doctrines. Beyond the inadequacy of theological education, practical training for the realities of parish life was in the words of Aston 'either minimal or nonexistent'. The picture that emerges is of clergymen generally ill-equipped to grapple with theological matters and thrust into parish ministry without any semblance of formal training in practical or pastoral matters.
There were exceptions to this pattern and attempts were made by church authorities to improve the oversight, education, and practical training of potential ministers. A number of instances may be cited. First, the tradition in Scandinavia was to train the Lutheran clergy in pastoral theology, and, given the attachment of the people to the state churches, this seems to have paid
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dividends. Second, during his tenure as Professor of Divinity at Oxfordbetween 1763 and 1776, Edward Bentham gave annual lectures to Anglican ordinands, providing them with an overview of the Bible and the rudiments of Greek. The most significant attempt to make ministerial education more relevant emerged with the growth of Pietism and evangelicalism. Pietists were wary about old-fashioned scholastic Lutheranism and demanded a return to the simplicity of the New Testament church. They argued that ministerial training should not concentrate upon dry theology or homiletics, but upon the Bible, prayer, preaching, visitation and the organization of prayer meetings. These concerns were reflected in the curriculum of the university at Halle, founded in 1694. Until 1727 between 800 and 1,200 students passed each year through Halle, where they were exposed to the ethos and practices of Pietism. Evangelicalism in Britain also pioneered new approaches to ministerial education. One of the most remarkable institutions was Trevecca College, founded in 1768 in Wales to educate itinerant preachers for the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion. Trevecca had no direct precedent though it did maintain the conviction of Protestants more generally that an educated ministry would be more socially respectable and better able to commend the gospel. The novelty of Trevecca was that it aimed to prepare men for the ministry rather than training the intellect. Classical learning and doctrine were not ignored, but lecturers concentrated upon personal religion and apologetics. Between 1768 and its demise in 1791, 212 students received an education at the college, the great majority of whom went into the ministry. Although there was no set duration of time for study and many attended for only a short period, Trevecca indicated the changing mood brought about by evangelicalism and provided the model for the better organized and regulated evangelical academies formed between 1780 and 1830 in England. An educated ministry remained indispensable, but the challenges accompanying the emergence of a modern society called for new methods of preparing individuals to minister to it.
Appointment and career patterns
The ways in which ministers were appointed to congregations reflected the ecclesiology of the denomination and the nature of the church-state relationship. Owing to their strong autonomous position, the church authorities in Württemberg appointed ministers directly to vacancies. In more absolutist states, the central government made great attempts to control all church patronage. The Swedish Church Law of 1688 had taken patronage from the hands of the nobles and given it to the crown. By 1693 the patronage of no
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fewer than 178 of Finland's 199 parishes was in the hands of the monarch. In a similar vein, a royal declaration in 1701 by Frederick, King of Prussia, determined that all pastoral appointments made by lay patrons must be ratified by his consistory. In other established churches the religious settlements of the sixteenth century produced a more complex situation and led to the alienation from church hands of parish appointments. Reflecting the situation as it had been for the previous century, in 1830 the proportion of patronage rights for parishes in the Church of England was in the following hands: 48 per cent laity, 24 per cent capitulary and parochial clergy, 12 per cent bishops, 9 per cent crown, with the remaining 7 per cent spread amongst a variety of groups. These bald national figures, however, mask regional variations. In the diocese of Canterbury, 60 per cent of the patronage of the 279 parishes was in ecclesiastical hands, including 105 parishes in the archbishop's alone.
The existence of lay patronage gave rise to a variety of problems. It could have a damaging effect upon the pastoral effectiveness of the parish clergy and the independence of the church. In Mecklenburg, lay patrons deliberately chose non-graduate ministers to ensure they remained in control of the parish. In the Netherlands, the rather weak position of the Reformed Church led to a conflict between regents and the church over the appointment of ministers and the content of sermons.1 The position was just as complicated and fractious in Scotland where the ideal of a congregational call clashed with the reality of landlord and crown patronage. The right of the people of the congregation to call their own minister had been claimed by church leaders since the Reformation and a form of congregational call had been adopted with the establishment of Presbyterianism in 1690. Despite assurances given in the articles of union in 1707 that there would be no parliamentary interference in the Scottish religious settlement, parliament passed the Scottish Patronage Act in 1711, which put the right of presentment to a vacant parish in the hands of the legal patron, who in most cases was a local landowner. This reimposition of patronage fomented congregational strife that was in turn compounded by the occasional appointment of 'riding committees' by the General Assembly. These were special bodies of ministers charged with installing in parishes unpopular candidates who had been presented by the landlord against the wishes of the local congregation and presbytery. The problem was that the various parties in the patronage controversy were not united about the key issues, particularly amongst opponents of patronage who could not agree as to which groups of people should be eligible to call a minister. These disputes also had strong social and political dimensions, as patronage was controlled by the large landowners, including the crown, to the detriment of small and
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middle-sized landowners who comprised the majority of the board of heritors, the Scottish equivalent of the parish council.
The system of congregational calls tended to work more smoothly in non-established denominations, yet even here there were important differences as to who exactly had the right to choose a minister. English Presbyterians had a variety of methods and, depending on the congregation, 'the people' could mean the trustees of the congregation, regular contributors, or the majority of hearers. In some cases the incumbent simply appointed his successor. Compared with congregational and Baptist churches, English Presbyterians had a much higher view of appointment to the clerical office. The former saw an appointment to a vacant charge as a transaction between the individual pastor and the congregation whereas Presbyterians emphasized the importance of the presbytery in ordination, a rite which could sometimes be extended over a couple of days. In a similar vein, Ulster Presbyterians in the late seventeenth century issued a call to a minister through the presbytery, which often proved problematical as a shortage of ministers meant that presbyteries had to adjudicate between the respective needs of several congregations when deciding which call to approve. Procedures for calling a minister were tightened over the course of the eighteenth century, as presbyteries further consolidated control over the process and as the Synod of Ulster introduced a form of social segregation by which a minister could only be appointed to a congregation if he had received the support of two-thirds of the membership and those who contributed two-thirds of the minister's stipend. Although Presbyterian and independent churches were in theory more egalitarian than Episcopalians, which groups actually comprised 'the people' was determined by the hierarchical assumptions of the period.
The means of appointing a minister had an obvious impact upon clerical career patterns and promotion opportunities. Even in Presbyterian and Congregational churches there developed definite hierarchies of remuneration, and certain congregations, especially in urban areas, were much sought after by candidates. In Episcopalian churches across seventeenth-century Europe, there emerged an identifiable career structure for clergymen. A prospective clergyman often began as a schoolteacher and could potentially work his way towards a bishopric and once there towards a better endowed see or even the primacy. In the Church of England, the league table of episcopal incomes was headed by Canterbury, which had an annual income of £7,000, and extended downwards through sees such as Lincoln, valued at £1,500, to poor sees such as Bristol at £450 per annum. Although the English episcopate became an increasingly aristocratic body over the course of the eighteenth century, this did not
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mean that those who were appointed to bishoprics lacked the necessary pastoral and administrative talents. The archbishops of Canterbury generally displayed intellectual ability and had developed good administrative skills in a clearly defined career structure that extended from parish ministry, through appointment to a cathedral prebendary and then to the see. The same was true of the Church of Ireland where there existed both a well-defined hierarchy of sees and a definite career path to them; English appointees came through the vice-regal chaplaincy and Irishmen were usually deans. On average, an individual bishop in Ireland served a total of ten years each in two sees, with the greatest turnover occurring in the first round of appointments. Compared with appointments to the French episcopate, promotion within the English and Irish system was much more gradual and based upon obvious ability rather than noble birth, hence English bishops tended to be older than their French contemporaries.2 Though such a defined career ladder suggests a degree of professionalization, initial appointment and promotion depended upon patronage networks, recommendations and family connections in addition to the candidate's ability. Appointments were therefore based on a mixture of influence and proven ability.
Though hierarchical structures provided a well-defined career ladder and curacies could, as in England, spell the first step in advancement, life was hard forthe majority ofthe clergy. Graduates lacking family influence orthe support of a patron were often consigned to poorly endowed, obscure rural livings that sometimes led to problems of clerical poverty, isolation, and loneliness. Many became curates, paid by the incumbent clergyman to perform his parish duties, and frequently forced to survive and maintain a degree of respectability on a mere pittance. Peter Virgin has concluded that no less than a fifth of curates in late Georgian England would remain as curates for the rest of their careers. An equally lonely existence awaited many Lutheran clergy in the German states and Scandinavia, especially in east Brandenburg with its poor livings and serious language problems, and in the Baltic regions where the clergy simply did not have the agricultural skills to live comfortably. Surrounded by an overwhelmingly Catholic population, Anglican clergymen in Ireland sought to alleviate the sense of isolation through correspondence, reading and some travel, though any companionship sprang from personal friendships rather than official arrangements. Churches did provide opportunities for those with ability to ascend to the dizzying heights of a bishopric or a wealthy urban congregation, yet for the majority of ministers, obtaining an adequate living was as much as could be hoped for, while many found themselves in isolated and dispiriting situations.
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Income
Clerical income derived from two main sources: legal exactions or voluntary contribution. Established churches used the former, though as with appointments, the precise relationship between church and state determined the manner and method of payment. The pastors of the Reformed Church of Geneva were appointed directly by the Venerable Company of Pastors and paid a fixed public salary of £30 per annum. The Lutheran pastors of Württemberg were also paid a regular wage directly by the state, as were ministers of the state church in the Netherlands. In states with a more complicated church-state relationship, however, the clergy were forced to negotiate the complex and disheartening tithe system. The tithe was simply a notional tenth of the annual productive value of the parish, though it became more complicated when it was subdivided into various types and was levied and paid for in different ways. Over the course of this period, payment in cash became the norm, though in more rural areas payment in kind, whether through crops, labour or other payments, remained. To make matters more complicated, in Prussia, Scotland and England, tithes were often alienated to a lay proprietor. In Scotland, each parish was overseen by the board of heritors, a body comprising the main landowners in the parish and members of the Kirk session. They were responsible for the collection of the Scottish equivalent of the tithe, the teind, which covered the bulk of the minister's stipend. They were also responsible for the upkeep of the meetinghouse, manse, school, and glebe. Teinds were paid in kind or cash and were traditionally collected at harvest. The teind holder in a parish, usually a large landowner, was legally bound to pass on to the heritors a proportion of the teind, from which the heritors were to pay the minister. Ministers however were in a vulnerable position as teinds were heritable property and many teind holders resisted paying the full amount due to the minister.
The Scottish example illustrates the complexity of the tithe system and the clash between religious and secular priorities. The value of the tithe depended on a host of factors including climate, soil type, population density, the legal framework, the willingness or otherwise of the parishioners to contribute, the legacy of medieval endowments, and the broader political context. For example, the power of lay tithe owners in East and West Prussia, Mecklenburg and the Pomeranias, reduced the local Lutheran clergy to poverty with no hope of redress. The plight of Prussian pastors forced them into becoming in effect employees of their patrons, a situation that could easily alienate them from their parishioners. Tithe contributions nose-dived and clerical stipends
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drastically fell in value in Sweden and Finland as a consequence of the Great Northern War and seven major harvest failures between 1700 and 1721. These various factors produced an enormous diversity in clerical incomes across regions and forced clergymen to rely upon other sources of income. Given the difficulty of collecting the tithe from hard-pressed tenant farmers, Irish clergymen appointed tithe proctors who were empowered to collect parish dues in return for which they were allowed to keep everything above the sum agreed with the clergyman.
Extravagance and luxury did not characterize the bulk of the Protestant clergy of Europe. Indeed of the Lutheran clergy in Württemberg, who enjoyed a much more comfortable position within the state than the rest of the Protestant clergies of Europe, 30 per cent had incomes below the recognized living wage. Many Church of England incumbents were obliged to teach, farm or engage in other tasks, while in Ireland clergymen supplemented their income by preaching funeral sermons, collecting small dues for performing rites of passage, marrying into money, or sometimes conducting illegal marriages. The paucity of income and lack of parsonages contributed to the much discussed and potentially vexing issues ofpluralism and non-residence. In England between 1705 and 1776 the incidence of clergymen who were incumbents of more than one parish increased from 16 per cent to 36 per cent, and though poverty was a reason it may also be related to a decline in the number of ordi-nands. Yet neither non-residence nor pluralism necessarily entailed pastoral neglect as many clergymen simply lived in a neighbouring parish or employed a curate. The case for pluralism in Ireland was more compelling given the extreme poverty of some dioceses. Of the parishes in the diocese of Ferns in 1712, for example, only thirty-two out of ninety-nine provided any income for the clergy.3 The inequality of the legal means of payment did in some cases produce a two-tiered system. The traditional losers were the curates who, as noted for England, could often remain in their impoverished and vulnerable position for their entire careers. Yet, measures were taken to improve clerical incomes. Despite its drawbacks, Queen Anne's Bounty formed in 1704 to raise the incomes of small livings, paid out £3,401,600 between 1713 and 1844. Owing to the impact of the Bounty and, more importantly, increased land values and commutation windfalls resulting from land enclosure acts, the average income for the Church of England clergy increased significantly over the course of the eighteenth century. It has been calculated that in 1736 that 5,638 benefices out of an approximate total of 10,500 were valued below £50 a year and that 20 per cent of that number were below £10; by the early nineteenth century, only a third of the entire clergy earned below £150 a year. The greatest increases
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occurred amongst the lower clergy; the income of perpetual curacies (a type of endowed curacy, which provided the curate with a degree of security of tenure), for instance, increased by a staggering 686 per cent over the same period.
Compared with established churches, non-established churches across Europe were on the whole less wealthy, the payment and collection of stipend more haphazard, and the variation in levels of income greater. This was especially true of persecuted French Protestant pastors who could often expect nothing more than a bed for the night provided by a member of the congregation. In more settled areas such as Ulster, stipend arrears were a serious problem for many Presbyterian ministers in the late seventeenth century, though the existence of a strong system of church courts made it possible to force at least some of the recalcitrants to pay. In 1674, the Antrim Meeting decided to set a minimum stipend of £30 per annum, while congregations were instructed to provide their minister with housing, fuel, land, and grain. Often a minister's stipend was paid in kind, congregations providing peat, land, bolls of oats, labour and other commodities as well as money. Though arrears remained common, the regulations had made a salutary impact upon income levels by the 1690s when the average stipend rose to £33 9s 6d. The minimum stipend was increased to £40 in 1753 and to £50 in 1770. Nevertheless inequalities remained. By the 1790s, the ministers of only two congregations had incomes over £150 and 131 ministers received less than £60 per annum. As in established churches, overall economic, political and social developments determined the actual payment of the agreed stipend. For example, owing to poor harvests, only one minister in Ireland's Route Presbytery was paid his stipend in 1717. Old Dissent in England also experienced enormous variations in the level of stipend. An enquiry in 1690 found that actual incomes of Dissenting ministers could vary anything from 40s to £100 per annum, with the average stipend being between £20 and £40. These income levels left little margin in the event of poor harvests or other economic difficulties, and many ministers had to find alternative sources of income. By the turn of the eighteenth century, various funds were established to ease the financial pressures upon Dissenting ministers, yet local congregations remained primarily responsible for a minister's stipend and this proved a considerable burden for many. Perhaps ironically, both Presbyterians in Ireland and Old Dissenters in England received an annual grant from the crown known as the regium donum, or Royal Bounty, which was intended in part to ensure their political quiescence. This was symbolically important in Ireland and was augmented on a number of occasions over the course of the eighteenth century, though the actual share per minister would always remain
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small: £600 between eighty congregations in 1689 worked out at £15 each and an increase in the number of congregations reduced the share to only £8 of a competent stipend of £40 in 1702. The piecemeal augmentations of the Royal Bounty were dwarfed by a massive endowment after the Act of Union of Great Britain and Ireland, enacted in 1800, partly out of a desire to secure the loyalty of Presbyterians in the wake of the 1798 rebellion.
If the French Huguenots, English Dissenters and Irish Presbyterians often found it difficult to provide for their ministers, the problem for newly formed Dissenting groups was even more formidable. A Methodist itinerant preacher reliedupon free board andpenny-a-weeksubscriptions from class and quarterly meetings. Reflecting Wesley's own convictions, this system was predicated upon the interplay of voluntarism and connexionalism - the collection of money was a means to an evangelistic end rather than an end in itself. As with their better-established contemporaries, Methodist preachers attempted to supplement their income in other ways, including the sale of homemade medicines, though a ban on receiving an additional income was enacted in 1770. Such was the financial plight of local preachers that many did not become itinerants; indeed, half of the 200 preachers accepted between 1741 and 1765 failed to become career preachers. As their expectations began to increase in the late eighteenth century, the lack of financial resources became acute and the system showed increasing signs of vulnerability. After all, as David Hempton points out, the entire system depended upon 'frugality goodwill, and bonds of affection' that could so easily be strained over financial issues.
Status in the state and local community
Depending upon the precise balance of power within confessional lands, the clergy were often part of the apparatus of the state which was reinforced by their educational attainments and family links with the secular elite. In central Europe, scholars have argued that there was a 'bureaucratization' of the Lutheran office from the seventeenth century, a process that produced a type of clergyman who became 'in effect yet another middle-ranking official'.4 By his Church Law of 1688, Charles XI of Sweden stripped the clergy of their independence, reducing them in the exercise of church discipline to, in the judgement of Michael Roberts, 'the mere agents of the state in a matter of public policy' and paving the way for the dominance of lay control over the church in the eighteenth century. There can be no question that the clergy adopted various administrative and judicial functions on behalf of the state and in some cases became indistinguishable from secular authority. Yet there
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is a danger of overestimating the politicization of the established clergy. The clergy were not solely or, in many cases, even partly, servants of the state. They had their own sense of calling and responsibilities that often conflicted with the aims and intentions of secular state policy. The majority were more concerned with the practicalities of running a parish, collecting stipends, and caring for the souls of their parishioners. The state in this period may have been extending its influence and structures but it was not so powerful as to be able to interfere systematically with the complexity of traditional parish life and day-to-day ministry.
The status of the clergy within voluntary or persecuted Protestantism was different again from that of their legally established counterparts. Owing to their geographical concentration and well-established church structures, the Presbyterian minister in Ulster occupied a prominent place in local communities. More significantly in political terms, Dissenting ministers in both Britain and Ireland were often found at the vanguard of republican politics as a result of their exclusion from the power structures of the state. An estimated sixty-three Presbyterian ministers in Ulster were implicated in the 1798 rebellion that aimed to overthrow British rule and establish an independent Irish republic. For less fortunate clergymen in Hungary and France the possibility of political activism was severely curtailed and the laity assumed their role as the political leaders of their communities.
How did the social origins, education, methods of appointment, career patterns, and income levels of the clergy affect their status in their local communities? On the whole, their status was ambiguous. On the one hand, on account of his education, ordination and income, the local clergyman was a person set apart, the representative of official religion and of the state if he was a minister of the established church. The absence of an extensive nobility in Württemberg and Sweden allowed the clergy to act as equals with the gentry and thus assume a conspicuous place in local society. In England the social and financial improvement of the clergy led to what has been termed their 'gen-trification' over the course of the eighteenth century as they self-consciously became part of'a propertied hierarchy' by the late Georgian period. More generally, the clergy were aware that they were part of the educated middle class that set them above the parochialism and ignorance of their rural parishes. Such an elevated status and an increasing identification with the social elite ran the risk of alienating the laity whose souls had been charged to their care. This was precisely the concern that animated Spener to seek ways of making the Lutheran pastoral office more responsive to the spiritual and practical needs of parishioners. Yet the danger of irrelevancy was tempered by the fact that
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the majority of the Protestant clergy were immersed in rural life, ministering to the people of the locality, sharing their joys and sorrows, working the same land and dealing with the same climate. According to Nicholas Hope, Lutheran pastors in the German lands and Scandinavia derived their status from being part of a local clerical family rather than from their social background. They were the guardians of the local Reformation tradition that was reinforced by their family's continuous occupation of the vicarage farm. In many areas such as central Europe, England and north-east Ireland, parochialism was strengthened by the tendency to appoint local men to vacancies. Such a close relationship with the local community undoubtedly had its advantages, but ministers could be hampered in their efforts to reform unofficial practices and beliefs by tradition, etiquette, patron interference, and the insularity of pre-modern parish life.
In general terms, the relationship between the clergy and the laity was symbiotic. In return for a salary and attentiveness during public worship, the laity expected ministers to conduct the weekly services, to preach adequately, to visit the sick and to be aware of significant developments in the life of the parish. The equilibrium of clerical-lay relations was upset when the traditional pattern of doing things was disrupted by the ignorance or calculation of the minister, the narrow-mindedness of the laity, or changes within society more generally. For example, compared to the systemic character of anticlericalism in France, incidents of anticlericalism in Britain were usually the result of local conflicts rather than a criticism of the system. Disputes only became common from the 1760s as a consequence of the rising financial status of the clergy and their appointment as magistrates. Yet in Scotland, Callum Brown has noted that hostility towards the clergy was 'hardly present at all' owing to their shared experience of hardship produced by the modernization of the Scottish economy.
Whether the developments outlined above promoted the professionaliza-tion of the Protestant clergies depends to a considerable degree upon what is taken as the measure. In addition to their monopoly of preaching, they took on other marks of an early modern profession, including a specialized education and training, a sense of belonging to a defined occupational group with its own language and symbols, and a clear sense of their role within the broader community. It is clear that despite changes in the intellectual, economic and political climate, they retained a commitment to a number of standard duties such as preaching, catechizing, pastoral visitation, and the performance of the rites of passage (baptism, confirmation or first communion, marriage, and burial). Pietism and evangelicalism certainly ensured that the performance of
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these duties was more thorough and focused, but it would be unwise to denigrate the sincere efforts of clergymen who did not share these views and who did the best they could in often trying and demoralizing situations. Arguably, the Protestant clergy could never become simply a professional group. As with the relationship between Christianity and culture more generally, the precise relationship between the spiritual vocation of a minister and the secular understanding of that calling would always be ambiguous. Yet it was within this context that individuals decided to become clergymen and it is the struggle they experienced between their spiritual calling and the demands of the world that should be of perennial interest to scholars of the Christian tradition.
Notes
1. J. L. Price, Holland and the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century: The politics of particularism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 74-80.
2. D. J. Roorda, 'Contrasting and converging patterns: Relations between church and state in western Europe, 1660-1715', in A. C. Duke and C. A. Tamse (eds.), Church and state since the Reformation: Britain and The Netherlands vol. VII - papers delivered at the seventh Anglo-Dutch historical conference (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), p. 139.
3. S.J. Connolly, Religion, law and power: The making of Protestant Ireland 1660-1 j6o (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 183.
4. R. Po-Chia Hsia, Social discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550-1750 (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 17-18.
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