Blogs and the Reformation

In a characteristically thoughtful meditation on the strengths and weakness of blogs (on the Books and Culture site), Alan Jacobs includes these reflections from CS Lewis:

“As I think about these architectural deficiencies [of blogs], and the deficiencies of my own character, I find myself meditating on a passage from a book by C. S. Lewis. In his great work of literary history, Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century, Lewis devotes a passage to what he describes, with a certain savageness, as ‘that whole tragic farce which we call the history of the Reformation.’ For Lewis, the issues that divided Catholics and Protestants, that led to bloodshed all over Europe and to a seemingly permanent division of Christians from one another, ‘could have been fruitfully debated only between mature and saintly disputants in close privacy and at boundless leisure.’ Instead, thanks to the prevalence of that recent invention the printing press, and to the intolerance of many of the combatants, deep and subtle questions found their way into the popular press and were immediately transformed into caricatures and cheap slogans. After that there was no hope of peaceful reconciliation.”