Duffy reviews Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650, at First Things.
It is hard to dissent from the detail of all this. Yet one may well feel that whether in Gregory’s stark dissection of the leading ideas of Protestantism as the unwitting corrosive which dissolved the moral and religious coherence of Christendom, or in Eire’s more hesitant and nuanced analysis, there is something left unsaid. The principle of sola scriptura and Protestantism’s consequent inability to arrive at workable criteria to determine Christian orthodoxy certainly contributed to the breakdown of Christendom and the emergence of a secular society. But so too did the repressive authoritarianism of post-Tridentine Catholicism, the emergence of a Catholic ecclesiology inimical to true communitas by its overemphasis on clerical power and centralized authority, and the acceptance into Catholic theology, philosophy, and anthropology of a dualistic Cartesianism every bit as inimical to the medieval intellectual and moral synthesis (if such a thing can be said to have existed) as anything that emerged from Wittenberg or Geneva. Nonetheless, Eire’s majestically comprehensive survey leaves no doubt about the enduring consequences, for good and ill, of the religious upheavals of the sixteenth and subsequent centuries. His readers will decide for themselves whether there is much to cheer about in 2017.