Roy Pascal - The Social Basis of the German Reformation

The Social Basis of the German Reformation was Roy Pascal's first book as he embarked on a significant career as a historian of Germany. 1933 was a good time to become a historian of that country, and Pascal followed up this work with a number of other books on Modern Germany and the Nazi dictatorship. Pascal is, perhaps, best known to the left because he was the first translator into English of Marx and Engels' German Ideology. Pascal was a follower, at the time, of the Communist Party, and the Social Basis was an attempt to study the Reformation from a Marxist point of view. As such Pascal places much importance on the economic context to the changes, though the book is also essentially a political biography of Martin Luther.

Pascal opens with the religious context for Martin Luther's life, and argues that:

In the final form of his theology… Luther identified the certainty of salvation with faith. Both were sheer gifts of God, unconnected with any mental faculties. Thus, while in the first stage of his thought he humbled man to the most despairing helplessness, he now exalted the individual far higher than former theologians had done, making him free of outward observance and intellectual discipline.

Pascal captures both the development of Luther's ideas and the difference to how others had understood Christianity. But the context was important. Pascal argues that Luther was reflecting the ideology and interests of a new class of people - the petty bourgeois. Thus his ideas were the “most profound expression” of the breakdown and reforming of the “mediaeval” political system. Pascal continues:

By asserting that grace was an irrational quality, which could not be reduced to intellectual terms and whose presence could be detected by the recipient alone, he broke down the medieval relationship between the individual and the Church. But at the same time his doctrine of the evilness of man's will bound the individual irrevocably within the existing social order. 

This theme of humans trapped by their social order becomes a theme for Pascal, who argues that there were two consequences. By isolating the religious experience in the individual, Luther took away the raison d’etre of the Church, and so made the breakdown of the Church possible. But crucially, Luther, as a representative of a new class, feared the movements that he had unleashed. Luther’s “first step backward” from this “revolutionary programme” [over child baptism] because he “feared the class of men who advanced this theory… feared the two consequent application of his theories because it would lead to the destruction of any system”.

Luther thus, as many writers have noted, saw obedience to the social order as the other side of the coin of his programme to reform the Church. His apparent about turn as he condemned the Peasants' War and urged the ruling class to massacre the revolting peasants is the direct consequence of this. Pascal argues that Luther was not a "conscious agent of the petty bourgeoisie" and instead was motivated primarily by spiritual interests. But that "he was intellectually identified with the outlook of his class, considered its values as absolute and final, and was ready to sacrifice everything to them, in the present and in the future".  There was, for Luther, what Pascal calls a "consistency of class interests". 

Is this accurate? Firstly it is refreshing to note the approach Pascal takes. Too many biographers separate Luther and the Reformation from class and economic considerations. Even where they do note political and economic context, there's a tendency to ignore class. So Pascal is worth reading because he bends the stick in the other direction. However I do think that Pascal has a tendency towards economic determinism here which fits with the cruder politics of the Communist Party in the 1930s - even though Pascal himself denies this in the last pages. Nonetheless, Pascal does identify the way the "peculiar structure of the Empire" shaped a particular type of struggle that linked the interests of the Princes and the "middle class" towards "re-moulding" society. But I think he goes too far, not least because he tends to identify classes/groups in 16th century Germany with their 20th century counterparts. Can one really talk of an "urban proletariat" in the 1520s? What does "middle class" mean in this context?

Nonetheless, given the failure of too many historians of the Reformation to try and grapple with class, it is refreshing to read Pascal. In conclusion he hopes that the book does provide "a clue to the meaning of the immense fermentation which was the Reformation". I would suggest that it offers much more than this, even if there are problems with his analysis.

Related Reviews

Stanford - Martin Luther: Catholic Dissident
Roper - Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet
MacCulloch - Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700