What impact did Martin Luther and John Calvin have upon the perceptions and events of the old world?

Answer 1

Catholic AnswerMartin Luther and John Calvin were more the result of the world that they lived in rather that the cause of it. European spirituality and Christianity had been growing cold, relegated to Sunday only, and people had been becoming more secular and business minded for centuries. Calvin and Luther just codified this, aligning their new "religions" more with the worldly values, instead of the way that things had been all through the Ages of Faith, when people ruled their entire lives in the light of God's love. Martin Luther, even if unknowingly, rejected free will, as he didn't see himself improving from his religion, and John Calvin carried this to its logical conclusion with the repulsive and un-Biblical notion that God actually predestined some people to go to hell, thereby completely denying free will, and man's responsbility to live by God's commands.

extracted from Ten Dates Every Catholic Should Know by Diane Moczar, c 2005 by Diane Moczar, Sophia Institute Press, Manchester, NH 03108

The high point of the Renaissance was (late Renaissance) was the 14th to the 17th centuries. It was a broad and complicated movement all throughout Europe that actually extended its beginning back to the 12th century. Some things which characterized the Renaissance were an interest in classical forms, both in art, architecture, and language; and new ideas based more on Science to the exclusion of faith. Before the Renaissance, there had been great developments in science, but they are were all by people of faith who were guided by their belief in God. As a matter of fact, there had been glorious developments in most fields before the Renaissance, but they mostly fell into disfavor with the advent of the Renaissance.

There were also factors, not directly related to the Renaissance in bringing classical ideas and languages into the present, that contributed to the disaster known as the Renaissance. Bad weather contributed to the famine of 1315 to 1322 and caused mass starvation in northern Europe with some areas experienced a death rate of ten percent. These was followed in France by seven other famines during the same century.

Less than 30 years later, the greatest plague the world had known - the Black Death - took millions of lives in a particularly gruesome fashion. Throw in the Hundred Years War between England and France and you have a setting for major disaster.

St. Francis of Assisi had noted a growing coldness, a lack of fervor and devotion that had invaded society, the love of God had grown cold. This was even noted in the Collect for the Feast of the Stigmata of St. Francis in the traditional liturgy (on September 17): O Lord Jesus Christ, Who, when the world was growing cold, didst renew the sacred marks of Thy passion in the flesh of the most blessed Francis, to inflame our hearts with the fire of Thy love, graciously grant that by His merits and prayers we may continually bear the cross and bring forth fruits worthy of penance. Another sign of this spiritual chill is the fact that the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 was obliged to require reception of Holy Communion at least once a year under pain of mortal sin!

Two other things which contributed to this were that late medieval society was growing greedy, becoming more business minded, concentrating more on making money than saving their souls. And the new philosophy characterized by William of Ockham whose philosophy of Nominalism subverted the great scholastic synthesis of faith and reason by destroying its philosophic foundation in Aristotelian realism.

All of this, put together, set the state for what would become the most horrific catastrophe of Christianity in centuries, if not forever: the protestant revolt:

"All the water of the Elba would not provide enough tears to weep over the disasters of the Reform: the ill is without remedy." - quote from one of the major players in the protestant revolt, and one of Martin Luther's staunchest allies and friends: Melanchthon. Even Luther, shortly before his death, wrote of his distress at the chaos and proliferation of sects that his teachings had unleashed: "I must confess that my doctrines have produced many scandals. I cannot deny it, and often this frightens me, especially when my conscience reminds me that I destroyed the situation in which the Church found itself, all calm and tranquility, under the Papacy."