Reformation blues

Last night I was rooting around for some bedtime reading, and pulled off the shelf a copy of Will Durant's history of the Reformation, which I'd bought at a used book store years ago for a couple of dollars. I read the first chapter, which set the stage for the Reformation. There's nothing quite like history to both reassure and panic simultaneously. It was reassuring to once again be faced with the facts that the Church was once upon a time in much worse condition than it is today ... and survived. It is panic-inducing -- well, not quite that, but worrying all the same -- to see how human flaws can so easily thwart our ability to haul our collective oxen out of the ditch. The Roman Church was enormously corrupt in the day -- nobody disputes that. Its corruption had a lot to do with the fact that during the Dark Ages, it had essentially saved Europe by acting as the de facto government. With worldly power and riches came the inevitable. What's so hard to accept, at least for me, is how even popes who could see what was happening, and who wanted to reform things to keep the Church -- and Christendom as a unified concept -- from throwing itself off a cliff were largely powerless to do so. Too many people at all levels of Church bureaucracy were too dependent on the status quo to accept the kind of change that was needed to restore the Church to sanity and responsibility, much less holiness. Here's Durant:

The popes -- Boniface IX in 1392, Martin V in 1420, Sixtus IV in 1478 -- repeatedly condemned these misconceptions and abuses, but they were to pressed for revenue to practice effective control. ...The Church tried repeatedly, and often sincerely, to cleanse her ranks and her courts, and to adopt a financial ethic superior to the lay morality of hthe times. The monasteries tried again and again to restore their austere rules, but the constitution of man rewrote all constitutions. The councils tried to reform the Church, and were defeated by the popes; the popes tried, and were defeated b y the cardinals and the bureaucracy of the Curia. LeoX himself, in 1516, omourned the utter inefficacy of these endeavors.

The collapse and re-formation of Christendom developed a kind of inevitability. There were spectacular, Church-sponsored cultural achievements during the period building to the crisis point, but none of this glorious business addressed the root causes of the crisis -- and in fact, may be thought of as an expression of it, in the sense that the luxury and worldliness represented by the Church's sponsorship of this art and architecture symbolized the Church's giving itself over the the spirit of the age. (Thought experiment: Would we give back the artistic achievements of the Italian Renaissance in exchange for the Reformation never happening?)

What interests me about this is not ecclesiastical matters, but what it says about our secular/political/cultural situation in contemporary America. At the risk of sounding Marxist, our prosperity depends on an efficient economic system that inevitably alienates people from their communities and even their families (in the sense that our highly mobile economy makes it increasingly likely that people will have to move away from their communities to hold employment). The individualist ethic that rules our society, like the individualist-consumerist economy, has produced great riches, and wrought achievements that no one can deny. And yet, one senses a decay in civic consciousness, a softening in our character, an inability to imagine sacrificing our present situation for the sake of preserving the commons for the future. Look at what Bush tried to do with Social Security reform. His might not have been the ideal plan, but at least he tried. It's not his fault that the political class and the public -- that's me and thee -- did not want to imagine giving up this scheme that plainly cannot last in its current form. Similarly, the GOP's abhorrent record on spending reflects, I think, the public will: we the people really want to see our taxes cut and spending increase for the things we like. Could it be that the stasis we observe in both political parties is a reflection of both of them being so dependent on the status quo that they can't imagine thinking beyond it? Is it possible that the mess that both the GOP and the Democrats are in are not the cause of our problems, but a manifestation of it?

Think about it: No politician could get elected today on a platform of raising taxes and/or cutting public spending for the sake of the long-term common good. I suspect no politician could get elected today on a natalist platform, even though the birth dearth crisis is going to be very serious indeed; people don't want to be told that the consumerist-individualist mentality they've accepted as reflecting metaphysical truth is unsustainable. Besides which, our 24/7 media culture swiftly and brutally punishes any politician who commits the heresy of questioning his or her tribe's dogma.

That there will be a reckoning for the way we've chosen to live. I wonder what our breaking point will be? I wonder who the Luther will be, and what his Theses will say?