Reformation and modernity

In her Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Cultural Memory in the Present) , Regina Schwartz describes the collapse of the medieval sacramental system under Protestant assault, and the eventual transfer of longings for a sacred order to secular pursuits: “Instead of leaving God leaving the world without a trace, the very sacramental character of religion lent itself copiously to developing the so-called secular forms of culture and that these are often thinly disguised sacramental cultural expressions.”

She acknowledges that this was not the Reformation’s intention.

Even Zwingli “still maintained that a community was mysteriously constituted through the ritual of the Eucharist; indeed, for him, the real body of Christ was the collective community of believers who shared the ritual.”  Yet, she thinks that the reforms of Eucharistic theology and practice represented an attempt to “accommodate a sacred world-view to one of burgeoning modernism.”  Concepts of time, space, agency, symbolism were all altered in the process, and left Protestant poets longing for a material-spirituality that their theology led them to disown.

The Reformation was not the dawn of modernity, Schwartz says, but the demolition project that had to take place before modernity could rise: “Because sacramental thinking is completely alien to the way modern secularism has conceived matter, space, time, and language, in a sense it had to be almost dismantled for modernism to be born.”

I’m not sure Schwartz gets the Reformation fairly in every respect, but there’s a good deal in her analysis that holds true.  And it poses some questions and some conclusions.  The questions are uncomfortable: Can Protestantism wriggle free from the negative features of modernity without ceasing to be Protestant?  Is Protestant anti-modernity coherent, or is it self-defeating?

The conclusions: Any anti-modern Protestantism has to be a catholic, sacramental Protestantism.  That is to say, an anti-modern Protestantism will be something very like the original Protestantism, though one that has learned some things since the sixteenth century.