FREE ESSAY ON REFORMATION AND RITUAL

REFORMATION AND RITUAL

Question: What attitude or attitudes did the Reformations take towards popular religious
forms? And how did the Reformations themselves come to embody ritual elements?
The Reformation was a period of much social unrest. Whilst there existed a physical
struggle evident upon the surface, underneath lie an intense philosophical and religious
debate that served to test and question the values of Catholicism and the reasons for the
need for change argued by the Protestant. The Reformation movement challenged the
Catholic belief system. It argued against the praising and worshipping of icons and other
such relics and argued that all praise and worship should be reserved for the Word of God
and God alone. However, there is evidence to suggest that early Protestants felt a need
for the reassurance offered by such icons and further, it has been argued, that the
Protestant Reformers, in attempting to destroy ritual, actually served to strengthen
Catholic belief in same. The irony is, in that attempting to destroy such rituals, the
movement actually served to embody ritual elements. The methods by which it attempted to
destroy ritual, can actually be interpreted as being ritualistic in and of themselves.
The Christian Sacraments were and are an important part of Catholic life. In
understanding the significance of such sacraments to the Catholic and the theoretical
arguments against same put forward by the Protestant Reformer, the need for the Reformer
to extinguish such importance, becomes evident.
For both the Catholic and the Orthodox the Eucharist represented and represents the body
of Christ. It is believed that initially, the Eucharist is simply unleavened bread,
however upon being blessed such bread actually turns into the body of Christ, a
metaphysical transformation occurs that remains unexplained except by reference to a
miracle and a blessing. Conversely the wine is believed to become the blood of Christ. It
is believed that both serve to work towards granting the believer remission from sin and
everlasting life1. The host and the sharing of same was not only believed to relieve the
sinner of the burden of his sins but further had a social function. The sharing of the
Eucharist worked to achieve a sense of social cohesion, a sense of unity and togetherness
within a society where conflict and turmoil was a part of daily life2.
However, Antoine Marcourt, a French Protestant Reformer, like many reformers of her
period, argued that the Eucharistic rite was merely a materialistic ceremony and served
to distract followers from the true faith. It was argued that the rite was merely an
empty performance with little true significance. In Marcourt's own words It is an over
dulling and darkening of the spirit and understanding of the people to cause them to . .
. stare at a little bread, at a visible and corruptible thing3. For the reformers the
host was a physical object, nothing more, that served to detract from the importance of
the fundamental Word of God.
For the Reformist, the physical act of eating and drinking was less significant than the
actual words used during the Eucharistic ceremony. Whilst physical preparation for the
rite, such as fasting, were useful in achieving a certain level of focus necessary to
receive Communion, these acts alone were not fundamental to the Sacrament. What was
fundamental was an unwavering belief in the promise by God to 'forgive sins' upon
receiving the sacrament. As Martin Luther writes in his 'The Small Catechism of Martin
Luther', Of course, eating and drinking do not do these things. These words, written
here, do them: given for you and shed for you to forgive sins4. 
During this period it was not considered necessary for the masses to understand the
processes of transubstantiation that turned the unleavened bread into the body of Christ.
More truthfully, it was considered beyond the possible comprehension of the masses. As
such, the Reformist argument is that the congregation became a part of an empty ritual.
Taught when to kneel and when to stand and what to say without actually understanding
same. The laity were advised that understanding was not important, that actions were
paramount5. For the Reformist, such ceremony become fraud and was deemed illusory6. 
Various Reformists throughout time have argued that the Last Supper has been
misinterpreted. Andreas Karlstadt has argued that when Jesus said this is my body he was
not referring to the piece of bread in his hands but rather was pointing to his actual
body. Ulrich Zwingli argued that when Jesus said this is my body the use of 'is' was
actually equivalent to the term 'signifies' and thus meant that the bread served to
signify his body7. Interpreting the Last Supper as above mentioned served to rid the
event and strip the event of much of its spiritual and miraculous character, thus
rationalising the Last Supper and shifting its significance from being a miracle, to
being simply symbolic.
The Reformists attempted to shift the focus of the Eucharistic Rite from being a physical
rite to a wholly spiritual and intellectual experience. It was not in the taking and
digesting of the bread that was the primary focus and offered God's blessing, but rather
the full understanding and comprehension of the Word's used that were central and
fundamental to the sacrament. 
Baptism is the first Christian Sacrament. It is believed that the sacrament of baptism
serves to incorporate the newly born child into the community and church and further to
redeem the child from original sin, that is, his/her conception8. Radical Reformists such
as Andreas Karlstadt argued that reserving the rite of baptism for newly born children
was a contradiction. Karlstadt questioned: how is it that a child has the need to be
baptized when the same child has no ability to comprehend sin nor is that child able to
formulate the mal-intent necessary to perform a sinful act? Further the radical
Reformists again relied upon the words of the Bible and argued that nowhere in the Bible
was it specified that children should be baptized. Furthermore, Jesus himself was a
mature adult when baptized9. For the Reformist Baptism had little to do with blessed
water and much more to do with God's Word. It was not in the actions of dipping the
individual in Holy Water that served to grant the forgiveness of sins, redemption from
death and eternal salvation, but rather the power of the words of God combined with such
water. As Martin Luther articulates it; Water doesn't make these things happen, of
course. It is God's Word . . . Because, without God's Word, the water is plain water and
not baptism10. Thus, for the Reformer, whilst water was a significant aspect of the
sacrament of Baptism, the sacrament as a rite of passage could not be performed without
an understanding, an appreciation of and a belief in the promises made by Jesus in the
Bible.
By attempting to understand the Reformists attitudes toward the sacraments of Holy
Communion and Baptism it becomes apparent that the Reformation was an attempt to move
away from the physical and move towards a more intellectual and rational foundation for
spirituality. Mental devotion was deemed to be of greater importance and able to achieve
a greater level of faith than physical devotion11. 
The Catholic and Orthodox faiths relied much upon the sense of sight in understanding the
scriptures. Paintings, sculptures, stained glass windows, and other small icons served to
illustrate the teachings of the Bible in a society where illiteracy was the norm. For the
Reformer however, such visual stimuli served to distract the individual from the truth of
God's message12. The Reformists pointed to the hypocrisy that lie behind the visual
experience, the money and materials used in creating these icons could be better spent on
aiding the needy of society, and this was deemed to be representative of the true image
of God13. Piety and pious behaviour was thus promoted as not being the worship of images
and icons but rather the practice of charity14. For the Reformer, faith was about loving
and fearing God alone; To love or trust other beings or things was idolatry, to fear them
led to superstition15. 
Both Catholic and Protestant faith centered around the individual working to imitate
Jesus Christ. For the Catholic much of this was a purely physical experience and involved
such activities as fasting. Pain became the individual Catholic's means of offering a
sacrifice to God. For the Reformer, the physical sacrifice was deemed mostly irrelevant.
The Reformer believed that an imitation of Christ was best performed intellectually
rather than physically16. The rationality behind this is attributable to the Reformations
promotion of the believed hypocrisy of the Catholic Church. For the Protestant Reformer,
the Pope and his Church were political, hypocritical and even evil. A poem written in the
fourteenth century by Raimon de Cornet, criticizing the Avignon Papacy is much indicative
of this attitude. De Cornet begins: 
I see the pope his sacred trust betray,
For while the rich his grace can gain alway,
His favors from the poor are aye withholden.
He strives to gather wealth as best he may,
Forcing Christ's people blindly to obey,
So that he may repose in garments golden
and concludes:
While round the church still growing evils fester17.
Essentially, the poem highlights the fight of the Protestant Reformer. Whilst Catholicism
focused upon unbelief, the Reformation movement was an attempt to attack misbelief.
Whilst the Catholics were preoccupied with eliminating devil worship, heresy and
witchery, the Reformer focused upon eliminating idolatry and the alleged hypocrisy within
the Church18. 
Aside from this, the Reformation and its followers, possessed a far more aesthetic and
philosophical theory for deeming the physical sacrifice to be of little worth and rather
maintaining that the ultimate sacrifice was mental. For the Protestant Reformer, the one
man is actually divided into two parts, the flesh and the soul, that is, the outward and
inward man respectively. It is believed that whilst it is inevitable that the outward man
perishes, inward man is constantly growing and flourishing and is thus being renewed. As
a result of the inevitability of physical mortality, physical devotion serves to
accomplish little, it cannot serve to purify the soul. For the Protestant Reformer, only
the Word of God and a true belief in same, could serve to purify the soul19.
Thus, the Reformation Movement attempted to promote the need for an understanding of the
mass and not simply a blind devotion to God whereby such devotion could be demonstrated
physically. For the Reformer, physical devotion could be practiced by anybody, even those
who were not true believers. It was maintained that the purest form of devotion was
mental. As such, most ceremony and ritual were condemned for there superficiality. Any
sense of the magical or belief in miracles performed other than by God, were attacked.
Within the Catholic faith there was much reliance placed upon the 'magic' contained in
sacraments and sacramentals and the miracles performed by Saints. Whilst the receiving of
sacraments involved the performance of physical action, this action was said to lead to a
much higher and transcendental, or magical, experience20. Via sacramentals and the
worship of same, the individual Catholic could himself attempt to invoke a sense of
something miraculous or magical21. However, For the Catholic there existed both positive
and negative magic. The positive magic was that which benefited the world or that
nonetheless came from God or Saints. However, negative magic was that practised by the
devil and resulted in much devastation22. 
The Reformation attempted to rationalize the Christian Faith and its secular world. It
attempted to separate the magical from the spiritual. It attempted to separate religion
from superstition via a method of internal rationalization23. For the Reformist it was
not possible to gain an understanding of God's teachings via man-created means. As such,
for the Reformer, the performance of ritual and the worship of small icons became
theoretically useless24. 
However, the Reformation Movement failed in its attempts to be rid of the magical,
superstitious, ritual and ceremonial traditions of Christianity25. In actual fact, the
Reformation served to heighten the perceived need of the masses for practitioners of
magic26. Furthermore, although the initial movement was essentially anti-ritual it seems
that the average Protestant believer felt the need for ritual. Protestantism failed to
give its followers any foundations for understanding anything regarding the supernatural.
This ambiguity and uncertainty regarding the supernatural has been deemed to be a result
of the denial of sacraments and sacramentals27. However, this denial was not necessarily
general. Since Protestantism held the Word of God to be superior to all else, prayer
books, hymnals and catechisms became the Protestant form of sacramental28. Finally,
throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the need of the masses for
sacramentals became evident and the consecration of objects such as; church foundation
stones, fonts and bells took place. Whilst it was insisted that such sacramentals did not
impart any sacred power or magic, Protestants failed to take notice and valued these
sacramentals as much as did their Catholic counterparts29. 
The difference between Catholic and Protestant ritual is one of degree and not kind. The
beliefs are very much the same. The differences lie in the fact that Protestantism has
attempted to capture and contain the 'spiritual'. Catholicism allows for a variety of
spiritual presence's, Protestantism does not30. Clearly, Protestantism did not abandon
the fundamental sacraments and basic forms of ritual. However, even within the
Reformation's attempted de-sacrilization of Christianity and ritual, even within this
process, evidence of ritual can be found. The Reformers developed their own form of
ritual within their acts of desecration. The Reformation can itself be described as a
ritual process31. 
The desecration of ritualistic and ceremonial objects can be argued as having possessed
the same characteristics as a right of passage. First, the object is removed from it's
environment. Second, it is tested. Finally, it is returned to its initial environment,
de-sacrilized. This seems to be representative of some sort of ritual process of
humiliation. The irony is that in order to attempt to destroy the ritual of sacrifice,
the desecrated images were themselves sacrificed by the Reformers32. The Protestant
believed that in destroying such objects a rite of purification took place whereby the
Christian was given the opportunity to forget any perceived need for images and rather,
remember and focus upon God's Word alone33. The Reformation movement employed the use of
the ritual of carnival to convey its message. The carnivals of the period served to, in
the light of fun and good humour, invert the status quo. As such, the carnivalesque
atmosphere was the perfect opportunity for the Reformer to denounce Catholic teaching,
de-sacrilize holy objects, and question the Catholic hierarchy34.
Initially, the Reformers were extremely skeptical of ritual. For the Reformer ritual only
served to detract from the all important Word of God. Theoretically the argument may have
been sound. However, whilst the Reformation was somewhat successful amongst the literate
elite, the masses relied upon ritual in order to gain an understanding of their faith.
Hence, the primarily stringent Protestant stance upon ritual later became flexible to
somewhat accommodate the masses. Further to this however, is the irony that within the
de-sacrilization of Catholic ritual and relics by Protestant Reformers, there existed
characteristics attributable to, and fundamental to, the practice of ritual.
Bibliography
Bibliography
Clark.S., Thinking With Demons, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997, pp 489-508.
Cressy.D., Birth, Marriage & Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life-Cycle in Tudor & Stuart
England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp 97-123.
Muir.E., 'The Reformation as a Revolution in Ritual Theory', Ritual in Early Modern
Europe, Cambridge, 1997, pp 155-184.
Scribner.R., 'Reformation, Carnival and the World Turned Upside Down', Social History,
Vol 3, No 3, 1978, pp 303-329.
Scribner.R., 'The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the Disenchantment of the World',
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XXIII:3, Winter 1993, pp 475-494
Internet Sites
Martin Luther: The Freedom of a Christian
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/REFORM/FREEDOM
Medieval Sourcebook: Raimon de Cornet - Poes Criticizing the Avignon Papacy
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/14Ccornet.html
The Small Catechism of Martin Luther, Part Four: Holy Baptism, Translated by Robert E
Smith on 10 June 1994
http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resource . . . erg/luther/little.book/book-4.txt
The Small Catechism of Martin Luther, Part Six: The Sacrament of the Altar, Translated by
Robert E Smith on 10 June 1994
http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resource . . . erg/luther/little.book/book-6.txt