October 27, 2023

Re: Reformation Day, Modern Doubt, and the “Saving Power” of Despair

“But our fate is / To find no resting place”

— Friedrich Hölderlin

October 31 is a busy day in the Gregorian Calendar. Most famously, of course, it is All Hallows’ Eve or Halloween—the day before the Christian “feast” of All Saints’ Day, which remains widely observed by many Western churches. And yet, October 31 also marks the eve of Samhain (pronounced SAH-win). Originally a Gaelic festival, which marked the end of harvest season and the beginning of the “darker half” of the year, Samhain has seen a recent resurgence amid the rise of “neopaganism.” Finally, October 31 is celebrated as Reformation Day among many Protestant bodies, especially in the Lutheran and Calvinist traditions. This holiday commemorates a famous historical event—what historian Peter Marshall has called “a remembered turning-point of civilization.”

Indeed, it was on October 31, 1517 that German theologian and Augustinian monk Martin Luther (1483-1586) allegedly marched up to the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg and nailed a list of propositions—formally entitled Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiarum—to the main portal of the church. Now generally (and more pithily) referred to as the Ninety-five Theses, this document is theologically provocative but not politically radical. Consider Luther’s 41st and 42nd theses:

41. Papal indulgences must be preached with caution, lest people erroneously think that they are preferable to other good works of love.

42. Christians are to be taught that the pope does not intend that the buying of indulgences should in any way be compared with works of mercy.

Such claims, in and of themselves, do not explain why 10/31/1517 should become “Reformation Day.” Luther’s immediate gripe was with Dominican friar Johann Tetzel (ca. 1465-1519), who, as Germany’s “Grand Commissioner for Indulgences,” raised money for various ecclesiastical-bureaucratic initiatives by selling notes representing the formal remission of temporal punishment in Purgatory. Luther detested Tetzel’s actions, penning a letter of protest to Albert of Brandenburg (1490-1545), Archbishop of Mainz. This letter, which contained the Ninety-five Theses, was in fact sent on October 31, 1517. Whether or not Luther also nailed the Theses to the church door at Wittenberg—his so-called Thesenanschlag—is doubted by historians. Nevertheless, it makes for great drama, and, as subsequently depicted by Philip Melancthon (1497-1560) in 1546, it remains the ultimate icon of principled rebellion. As Marshall puts it, “It is a gesture that seems at once assertively public and honourably private, challenging yet peaceful, a call to arms, and a call to calm reflection.”

Much has happened, of course, in the centuries since Luther’s celebrated Thesenanschlag. It is considered an iconic event, but, as the year 2024 nears, its meaning has no doubt changed or, at the very least, blurred. For example, one might ponder the sheer number of wars, both in Western culture and around the globe, since 10/31/1517. The so-called “European wars of religion,” said to begin with the “Knights Revolt” of 1522-23, raged for well over a century. Some of these conflicts were internal to religious groups or movements. For instance, the German Peasants’ War (Deutscher Bauernkrieg, 1524-25) received support from some Protestant Reformers (Mūntzer, Zwingli, etc.) and fierce opposition from others (Luther, above all). Later, the War of the Mantuan Succession (1628-31) served as a proxy war between two Catholic nations, France and Spain. Other conflicts, however, pitted Protestants and Catholics against one another—most famously, the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), which ravaged Central Europe for over a quarter century. Even if one follows William Cavanaugh, whose 2009 book The Myth of Religious Violence argues (persuasively, in my opinion) that “the liberal nation-state” has legitimated its importance by mythically fabricating “a religious Other,” it is hard to deny that, whatever its merits, Reformation Day also chronologically inaugurated a series of frightfully violent centuries.

This fact, of course, has nothing to do with Luther’s original intentions. As noted, his Theses actually constituted a Disputatio—an argument, not an attempt at full-scale reformation. According to Marshall, it was not “until long after” Luther’s gripe with Albert and Tetzel that his actions were associated with a movement known as “the Reformation.” What is the significance of term? For one thing, and whether one likes it or not, the very notion of “reform” has violent connotations. The term can be traced to the Latin reformare, which means to change or form again. In the realm of nature, this sort of transformation requires struggle and, at worst, brutality. Even a cursory understanding of the concept of “natural selection,” famously popularized by English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-82), grasps that it is a difficult affair. As Darwin puts it in his 1859 work On the Origin of Species:

If during the long course of ages and under varying conditions of life, organic beings vary at all in the several parts of their organisation, and I think this cannot be disputed; if there be, owing to the high geometrical powers of increase of each species, at some age, season, or year, a severe struggle for life, and this certainly cannot be disputed; then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of existence, causing an infinite diversity in structure, constitution, and habits, to be advantageous to them, I think it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variation ever had occurred useful to each being's own welfare, in the same way as so many variations have occurred useful to man. But if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterised will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offspring similarly characterised. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection.

What Darwin sees in nature—“a severe struggle for life”—is essentially an ongoing process of reformatio. Perhaps it is not surprising that Darwin—not to mention his pupils Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) and Thomas Huxley (1825-95)—would come to see the world in this way. Their rough contemporaries in philosophy (Hegel), economics (Marx), and philology (Nietzsche) would do something similar. Of course, all would arrive in the wake of Luther, whose Disputatio was taken up as a symbol of semper reformanda.

Whether or not this is a good thing is, of course, debatable. For every liturgical celebration of Reformation Day, for every endorsement of “processism,” ranging from Apple’s “Think Different” campaign to the cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), there is the Darwinian reminder that change, semper reformanda, necessitates conflict and suffering. To recognize this fact may be a boon in certain walks of life, say, in business or in sports. Indeed, the unmatched success of University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban has been attributed, at least in part, to his embrace of “process thinking.” For Saban, what we call a “football game” is nothing but a sequence of nonidentical and, in principle, discontinuous plays. Thus media questions about “what this game means” or “goals for the upcoming season” have to be dismissed as “rat poison.” At times Saban drives this point home with ferocity:

In a sense, Saban’s words are meant to be inspiring, though “The Process” has certainly proved daunting to many players. It’s not hard to understand why. After all, for the individual confronting questions of meaning and purpose, it is discomfiting to focus on change, discontinuity, and agonistic growth. In his Confessions (354-430 CE), Augustine of Hippo (ca. 400 CE) declares that, “amid times whose order I know not,” with thoughts that are “rent and mangled with tumultuous varieties,” he can only find solace in the “Father everlasting.” This is not merely antiquated kvetching. In a more comic register, the 2002 comedy Adaptation echoes Augustine’s logic. The film begins with a monologue—over the opening credits, no less—that doubles as an existential lament:

Do I have an original thought in my head, my bald head? Maybe if I were happier, my hair wouldn’t be falling out. Life is short; I need to make the most of it. Today is the first day of the rest of my life. I’m a walking cliché. I really need to go to the doctor and have my leg checked. There's something wrong. Oh well. The dentist called again, I'm way overdue. If I stopped putting things off, I would be happier. All I do is sit on my fat ass, if my ass wasn’t fat, I would be happier. I wouldn’t have to wear these shirts with the tails out all the time; like that’s fooling anyone. Fat ass. I should start jogging again. Five miles a day; really do it this time. Maybe rock climbing; I need to turn my life around. What do I need to do? I need to fall in love. I need to have a girlfriend. I need to read more; improve myself. Maybe I should learn Russian or something. Or take up an instrument. I could speak Chinese. I could be the screenwriter who speaks Chinese and plays the oboe. That would be cool. I should get my hair cut short; stop trying to fool myself and everyone else into thinking I have a full head of hair. How pathetic is that? Just be real. Confident. Isn't that what women are attracted to? Men don’t have to be attractive. But that's not true, ‘specially these days. There's almost as much pressure on men as there is on women these days. Why should I be made to feel like I should apologize for my existence? Maybe it's my brain chemistry. Maybe that’s what's wrong with me. Bad chemistry... all my problems and anxiety can be reduced to a chemical imbalance or some kind of misfiring synapses. I need to get help from them; but I'll still be ugly though. Nothing is going to change that.

Adaptation’s first scene immediately (and literally) ties the narrator’s voiceover to evolution writ large. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) watches uneasily as one of his scripts is being filmed. When told to leave the set, he wanders outside and begins to puzzle over the question “Why am I here?” As it turns out, this is a very complicated question:

For Kaufman, it is useless to say “you’re here because of evolution” or “your life is the random product of ceaseless change and transformation.” He experiences this state of affairs as an oppressive mystery—at least until he realizes he can exploit it. And yet, even this “solution” must give out at some point. Popular movies eventually get lost among the various “category codes” on Netflix; dominant football players, once driven by “The Process,” suffer injuries and need to retire. Even under the best of circumstances, an inevitable corollary of semper reformanda is strife, suffering.

How can one come to grips with this situation? For Augustine, as noted, the ultimate answer to this question is the “Father everlasting.” Only in the unchanging God can ever-changing humanity find hope. As he famously puts it in the Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” At the same time, however, Augustine was an institutional churchman, Bishop of Hippo Regius in present-day Algeria, who viewed the Catholic Church as “our true Mother” and “the true Bride of [Christ].” What the church teaches, then, is precisely what God teaches. To deny this truth is to deny God himself. No doubt drawing on his predecessor Cyprian of Carthage (ca. 210-58 CE), Augustine writes:

The spouse of Christ cannot be adulterous; she is uncorrupted and pure. She knows one home; she guards with chaste modesty the sanctity of one couch. She keeps us for God. She appoints the sons whom she has born for the kingdom. Whoever is separated from the Church and is joined to an adulteress, is separated from the promises of the Church; nor can he who forsakes the Church of Christ attain to the rewards of Christ. He is a stranger; he is profane; he is an enemy. He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother. If any one could escape who was outside the ark of Noah, then he also may escape who shall be outside of the Church.

Hence, for Augustine, to turn to the “Father everlasting” necessarily entails a turn to the Catholic Church. She is the one who, as “the ark of Noah,” sails safely through the stormy waters of earthly inconstancy. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus.

In spirit, if not in letter, Luther’s Thesenanschlag undermines Augustine’s rationale. It is a symbol of doubt as much as a symbol of protest. But doubt of what? In his Babylonian Captivity of the Church (De captivitate Babylonica ecclesia, 1520), Luther makes clear that he has come to distrust—nay, impugn—the institutional authority of the Catholic Church. Whereas before he “held that indulgences should not be altogether rejected,” given his longstanding “veneration” of Catholic teaching, he now insists that (and I quote, keeping Luther’s own emphasis) “INDULGENCES ARE A KNAVISH TRICK OF THE ROMAN SYCOPHANTS.” Similarly, whereas he had once recognized the authority of the Pope, he now views this claim as the golden calf of “coxcombs” such as Jerome Emser (1477-1527) and Johann Eck (1486-1583). Indeed, as Luther goes on, the Roman curia works not to liberate the laity but, rather, subjects people to a “miserable captivity” akin to Babylon of old. The one who would seek salvation (salus) must question and, indeed, reject the very institutional establishment that Augustine had deemed essential centuries before.

Still, Luther does not entirely break with the Bishop of Hippo. Both theologians agree that only the eternal can provide rest amid ceaseless change and transition. The difference is that, for Luther, no earthly institution can be identified with the eternal. One is saved “by grace alone” (sola gratia) in accordance with “scripture alone” (sola scriptura). This stands as a radical declaration of the importance of faith in God and in God’s word (sola fide). It also conveys a radical skepticism of earthly affairs. If, for a blessed few, the legacy of Reformation Day lies in grace and faith, the holiday’s implicit hesitancy and distrust have proven influential on a far greater scale.

Indeed, it is as if the standpoint of doubt was hammered into the consciousness of the West alongside Luther’ s Thesenanschlag. Roughly a century after Luther, the French polymath René Descartes (1596-1650), who himself claimed to be a faithful Catholic, introduced a form of methodological skepticism into Western thinking: “I doubt, therefore I am; or what is the same: I think, therefore I am” (Dubito, ergo sum, vel, quod idem est, cogito, ergo sum). Descartes’ interest was principally in epistemology and metaphysics, but the implications of “the cogito” are hardly confined to philosophical salons in Amsterdam or lecture halls in Oxford. Such was the argument of Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55), who, in late 1842 and early 1843, worked on a manuscript entitled Johannes Climacus, or De Omnibus Dubitandum Est. Though only published posthumously, this philosophical “narrative” was once praised by Hannah Arendt (1906-75) as arguably the “deepest interpretation” of Cartesian doubt. This claim may be true, but Kierkegaard’s approach to the matter is, in one sense, quite simple: in and through the figure of Johannes Climacus, a pseudonym to which he would return in later writings, Kierkegaard tries to show that “methodological doubt” is not easily translated into concrete life. Climacus wrestles with this problem in terms of his own intellectual aspirations. He longs to be a philosopher and has been told that all legitimate thinking starts with doubt. Yet, if this is true, then how can he even begin to be a philosopher—since, after all, he has to first believe (as many others clearly have) that all legitimate thinking starts with doubt?

Climacus grows concerned: is modern philosophy nothing more glorified chicanery? If not, how could university professors and public intellectuals gain an audience? “For they say, and do not.” On the other hand, if one were to actually doubt everything, one must start upon the path of magistricide—the murder of one’s teacher. As Kierkegaard puts it:

In an old saga, [Johannes] had read a story about a knight who received from a troll a rare sword that…craved blood the instant it was drawn. As the troll handed him the sword, the knight’s urge to see it was so great that he promptly drew it out, and then, behold, the troll had to bite the dust. It seemed to Johannes that he must have the same experience with that thesis: when one person said it to another, it became in the latter’s hand a sword that was obliged to slay the former.

There is, it seems, a latent violence in Cartesian doubt. Perhaps that is why Descartes treats the cogito as a harbor in the tempest. It is the chief eternal verity—an immanent version of Luther’s solae. And yet, these new “foundations” have their own fissures. Just as Luther’s protest released a deluge of alternative biblical interpretations, so did Descartes’ rationalism leave science and technology as the last authorities in human life. But even scientific expertise and integrity have grown shaky in the wake of the horrors of the twentieth century, from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the COVID-19 pandemic. The load-bearing walls offered by the likes of Luther and Descartes have not proven up to the task.

To suggest, as I’m doing here, that human society is now postfoundational is not an especially original claim. Certainly one can find this perspective, in one form or another, in the works of figures such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Žižek. My interest, however, is not to offer an exhaustive description (or commendation) of a position called “postfoundationalism.” Rather, it is to suggest that, whatever else we might think of such philosophical standpoints, two things cannot be denied: (i) the combination of doubt and disbelief represents and unavoidable experience for modern human beings, and (ii) this experience is a key part of the legacy of Reformation Day.

On the surface, the former may seem to be an indictment of the latter, implying that the legacy of the Reformation is cynicism, perhaps even nihilism. And this is not altogether wrong. It has often been remarked, for example, that the Watergate scandal introduced suspicion and disillusionment into the American political process. In truth, however, the modern mindset was already “primed” for this reaction. Watergate simply manifested and intensified what was already there. In subsequent decades, Watergate-like ignominies have mushroomed: the Iraq War of 2003-11, the “predatory lending” crisis and global recession of 2007-08, the (still unfolding) sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, the social unrest surrounding COVID-19 and the 2020 United States presidential election. Where does it end? Does it end? Institutional leaders create committees (and sub-committees) and hold hearings; they talk about talking. The public alternates between cycles of protest and despair.

Almost sixty years ago, and roughly a decade before Watergate, Bob Dylan had already intimated the desperation of the modern individual. As he sings (or almost raps) on “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” the penultimate song on Bringing It All Back Home (1965):

My eyes collide head-on with stuffed
Graveyards, false gods, I scuff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, I have had enough
what else can you show me?

“What else can you show me?” This question reads as a lament, but it also bears a kernel of hope. For it hints that there is something else. In fact, it would not be long until Dylan, worn out from years of political activism and drug-fueled touring, would retreat to Upstate New York and begin to study the Bible. He had lost faith in the socio-political establishment of the West, but he had not lost faith in faith. His institutional despair was not tantamount to atheism—quite the opposite.

The same, I would argue, could be said of Luther’s Thesenanschlag and the ultimate meaning of Reformation Day. As has been argued, protest and reform are a difficult business—and to always protest and reform (semper reformanda) even more so. The upshot is a gnawing sense of restlessness that, while treacherous, is nevertheless essential to the spiritual life. Indeed, one of the more curious phrases in the Bible is Μαράνα θά. Aramaic in origin, it is appropriated by the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 16 as a familiar exclamation. In fact, Paul does not bother to translate this expression into Koine Greek but simply transliterates it. Scholars have subsequently determined that it means “Come, Lord!” or “Our Lord, come!” In this form, it turns up again at the very end of the Bible, where, in Revelation 22, it is used as an eschatological declaration: ἔρχου Κύριε Ἰησοῦ! Christian mystics have long treated the Aramaic Maranatha as a mantra, which should be recited in order to prepare one for divine contemplation. Still, understood in context, it also a cri de coeur—a heartfelt call for God’s presence. As such, Maranatha does not emerge from safety, still less from self-righteousness. It proceeds from a longing that knows earthly despair all too well.

The religious experience couched within Maranatha is, I think, close to the spirit of Luther’s early reformatory intentions. Less than a year after October 31, 1517, the Augustinian Order convened in Heidelberg—a university city located in southwest Germany—to debate Luther’s Ninety-five Theses. Luther had joined the Augustinians in 1505, and his longtime mentor Johann von Staupitz (ca. 1460-1524) wanted to ensure that his charge was given a fair hearing prior to any institutional punition. The gathering took place on April 26, 1518, and Luther presented 28 additional theses. Many of these claims would go on to influence Protestant theology, but it is Thesis XX that best captures the inner meaning of Luther’s reformatio: “He deserves to be called a theologian…who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.”

Yet, if this is true, it is also true that the doubt and distrust—indeed, the suffering—of our current situation may yet prove redemptive. It is with such a paradox in mind that German poet Friedrich Hölderin (1770-1843), himself influenced by Luther, wrote in his 1803 poem “Patmos”:

Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst
Das Rettende.

“But where danger is, grows / The saving power also.” So, too, do things appear on Reformation Day when, amidst the ghouls and goblins of Halloween, Luther’s act of desperation simultaneously looks forward to the Feast of All Saints.