The Reformation

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The Reformation was the sixteenth-century upheaval that broke the unity of Western Christianity, producing the Protestant churches and the Roman Catholic response to them. Its conventional opening is 1517, when the Augustinian friar Martin Luther posted — or at least circulated — ninety-five theses against the sale of indulgences at Wittenberg; its conventional close is 1648, when the Peace of Westphalia ended the religious wars that the schism had set loose. What began as a quarrel over how sins were forgiven became, within a generation, a rupture in the political and intellectual order of Europe.

The reformers’ core claims were few and radical. Salvation came by faith alone, through grace alone, on the authority of Scripture alone; the institutional mediation of the Church — its priesthood, its sacraments beyond the two they retained, its purgatory, its cult of saints and relics — was held to be human addition rather than divine warrant. Luther in Germany, Huldrych Zwingli in Zurich, and John Calvin in Geneva built distinct theologies on that ground. Against them the Catholic Church mounted its own reform, defined at the Council of Trent (1545–63), which sharpened doctrine and discipline without conceding the central points. Alongside this magisterial Reformation, allied to princes and city councils, ran a radical Reformation — Anabaptists, Spiritualists, and others who rejected infant baptism, state churches, or the visible church altogether, and who were persecuted by Catholic and Protestant authorities alike.

The movement’s bearing on Western esotericism is double-edged, and scholarship treats it as such. Protestant polemic recast a wide field of inherited practice — the veneration of relics, the efficacy of blessed objects, the rites of exorcism — as either superstition or covert sorcery, and in attacking “popish magic” it helped draw the sharp modern line between religion and magic that earlier centuries had not pressed. The sociologist Max Weber later named the long result the “disenchantment of the world”: a gradual emptying of the cosmos of indwelling spirits and sacramental power, for which he held the ascetic Protestant temper partly responsible. That thesis is influential and contested; historians since have shown how much enchantment survived, and how vigorously both confessions hunted witches in the same period. Esoteric currents did not simply vanish under Protestant pressure. Some — Christian Kabbalah, Paracelsian medicine, the Rosicrucian writings of the early seventeenth century — took shape precisely within Protestant lands, often among reformers dissatisfied with where the official Reformation had stopped.

How much the Reformation caused, and how much it merely accompanied, remains among the open questions of early modern history. Its narrow legacy is plain enough: a permanently divided Christendom, a Europe of confessional states, a literate laity reading Scripture in its own tongue. The wider claim — that this is where the modern disenchanted world was made — is a reading, powerful and much argued, rather than a settled fact.

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