Priesthood of Plebs

In a 1977 review in Past and Present , John Bossy summarizes an essay by Heiko Oberman about the “closing gap between the sacred and the secular” in late medieval life (Oberman’s description). Bossy says this involved “an abandonment of metaphysical hierarchies in favor of a direct and covenantal partnership between God and man. His primary reference is to nominalist theology, but he sees this as common ground with humanists on the one hand and Reformers on the other, and in a fairly strong sense, if I understand him, as a pre-condition for both . . . . It is defended by reference to the claim made by the humanists, and by Luther, that all Christians, not just a special few, should be considered ‘religiosi.’”

Bossy is skeptical: “They certainly did claim this, and the claim had important consequences in the ‘social’ and in the political world; but to say that it brought closer together the sacred and the secular seems to me to confuse the holy with the religious. To hold that all Christians were entitled to be ‘religious’ was precisely to hold that neither any Christian individually, nor any Christian estate, nor the whole collectivity in which they participated, was entitled to claim an objective condition of holiness.”