God, Literature, and Religious Denomination in a Changing Christendom

By David Mudd

Beginning in the 16^th century, Western and Central Europe underwent a titanic shift in religious thought referred to today as the Protestant Reformation. Encouraged by the former Catholic monk Martin Luther, religious dissenters sprung up all across Christendom criticizing both the theology of the Roman Catholic Church as well as the social practices and customs, like the sale of indulgences, that had come along with it. These developments engendered a host of social upheavals throughout Europe, many of which brought on immense violence within communities and states. To get a sense of the significance of this changes, one could note that England, like many other places in Europe, went from having the same religious practice and authority since the Roman Empire to deposing a monarch for even the mere appearance of bringing the country back in line with Rome.

The consequences of this event shook Europe, which for so long had defined itself as “Christendom” in relation to its Catholic religious identity, to its very core. On the political level, the Reformation brought on rejection of the standard sources of authority centered on Rome. On the social level, it brought about re-evaluation of the proper role of religious life. And on the intellectual level, the impact of the Reformation began a process of changing the intellectual paradigm in Europe. Given the importance of the church in the lives of the community, these changes were widespread and incredibly significant. More over these changes were inextricably linked to each other: larger philosophical and intellectual changes in the way that people understood both God and the proper relationship of humankind to God helped enable changes in society and politics, and vice versa. (Throughout these short essays I will use both “God” and “the divine/divinity” interchangeably to denote the prevalent Christian understanding of ultimate reality.) In the middle ages (and long after) local places of worship acted as the bedrock of the community, tying individuals together and giving them a way to share their experiences with each other and create changes in the around them through religious rituals.

This changing world of this period begs the question: how did the common understanding of God, expressed in literary works, change during the Protestant Reformation and beyond? In trying to understand this, we will look at how exactly opinions and literary genre on the Christian God shifted between the resolutely Catholic Middle Ages with the daringly Protestant and tumultuous Early Modern Era. In these essays, that will look like examining two distinct periods of time, and two different works in each period. First, we will look at the works of medieval Catholic writers Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich to see how they use miraculous, mystical visions to express and relate to the divine. Then, I will provide some brief historical context on the Reformation before examining how Protestant works on religion and religious experience “intellectualized” the relationship of humanity to the divine.