Heinz Schilling. Early Modern European Civilization and its Political and Cultural Dynamism. The Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2008. ix + 124 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-58465-700-2.
Reviewed by Sean F. Dunwoody (Department of History, University of Chicago)
Published on H-German (April, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
Confessionalism as Dynamism in Early Modern Europe
In May 2006, Heinz Schilling held the Jerusalem Lectures in History given in memory of Menahem Stern. The slim volume under review now makes available to a wider audience the thoughts presented in Jerusalem, together with extensive endnotes. While readers familiar with Schilling's thoughts and interests will find few surprises, the text offers all readers, early modernists and modernists alike, a succinct presentation of Schilling's most current understanding of how the split of Latin Christianity into confessional churches contributed to the emergence of "the key structures and mechanisms that enabled Europe to embark on processes of fundamental change from medieval to early modern and modern forms in society, politics, and culture" (p. 3). Schilling considers this material from three different perspectives, each of which is covered in one of the volume's three chapters: the interplay of confessional churches and state building; confessional migration; and international relations.
Faced with dual and apparently antagonistic trends in historiography--a reassertion of national historical frameworks and a move towards global history--Schilling makes an argument for comparative history in the introduction to the volume. As he understands it, each of the many world "civilizations" should be investigated in terms of its peculiarities and then contrasted with other civilizations. Taking up one side of the proposed collaboration, Schilling here considers "Latin Europe" and its peculiar structures and institutions, which he identifies in Europe's strong concepts of "law" and "justice"; in its specific understanding of "liberty"; in the communal aspects of politics; in its distinction between the sacred and the secular; in the effects of minorities and migration; in its history of state-building; and in its development of international systems and international law. Schilling identifies these structures and institutions as sites of change in Europe from the early modern to the modern era. Schilling adopts a structural approach and brackets out the question of the agents who effect structural change.
In chapter 2, Schilling turns to the interplay of confessional churches and state-building, a topic for which he is perhaps best known.[1] Despite the fundamental changes of the sixteenth century happening in confrontation with religion, "Latin Europe" was singularly characterized by a close and permanent relationship between the sacred and the profane. This relationship, a product of Jewish, Roman, Greek, and Germanic traditions, was the crux of the European path to modernity. With the Kirchenspaltung and the creation of increasingly defined confessional churches, a new differentiation was introduced into Europe that Schilling characterizes as a positive force, inasmuch as it was the root of the competition between churches and the states who identified with or sponsored them. With the differentiation between the confessional churches, a number of key modernizing processes were fostered within the churches and their host polities, furthering institutionalization, bureaucratization, uniform education and training, and state and church control and discipline. These processes happened in step with the emergence of a confessionalization of Europe. Confessionalization occurred in stages, from the elaboration of dogmatic and institutional structures, to confessionally distinct churches and cultures, to confessionally inflected international relations and political cultures. At the end of the process stands the overcoming of confessionalism in the late seventeenth century, with the turn to philosophy rather than religion for solutions to pressing problems. By this point, however, the dual processes of secularization and resacralization had put Europe incontrovertibly down the road of modernization.
In chapter 3, Schilling considers a further mechanism of modernization fostered by another motor of differentiation since the Reformation: confessional migration. Continuing the work he started with his earliest studies on Dutch religious exiles, and furthered in the 1990s with a series of programmatic writings on what has come to be called "confessional migration," Schilling builds on the extensive historiography of the past ten years on religious exiles in order to argue a strong case for the key role these migrations played in the modernization of Europe, particularly through the dissemination of technologies, but also through the social adjustments made necessary by these groups of ethnic and religious minorities in majority populations.[2] Gesturing at the potential of a comparison of the Sephardic and Calvinist minorities in the lower Rhineland and Low Countries, Schilling focuses on the Calvinists of the Rhineland who have long stood at the core of his research in order to revisit the connection between the figure of the refugee, the development of modern liberal notions of tolerance, the valorization of inner-worldly asceticism, and economic advancement. Rather than serving as the symbol of the impuissant victims of the era's religious bigotry, the religious refugee, in Schilling's portrayal, is apotheosized as a central figure of modernization in Europe.
Finally, in chapter 4, after having considered its role in the process of internal homogenization and state control and in the linked dissemination of modern economic and artisan techniques and modern liberal attitudes, Schilling considers the effects of confessional differentiation on international relations in the early modern era. With the sort of presentist gesture entirely germane to lectures, Schilling alludes to structural similarities between the "structural interference of religion and politics" (p. 68) in both early modern confessionalized international relations and modern fundamentalism; the thought is, however, not pursued. Instead, the chapter hews closely to Schilling's presentation in his recent volume in the series of handbooks on history of international relations, most obviously in the chronology, with the focus on 1559 to 1659, the era of Spanish hegemony.[3] Thus, we see, in a well-written overview, the shift from confession as perhaps the most effective ordering principle of international relations to the reconsideration of politics as a category independent of confessional occupations. In between stands, of course, the endless warfare and death of the Thirty Years' War, the very brutalities of which helped drive the shift. By the end of that hundred-year period, the categories long present, even if merely tacit, in church-state relations in Europe--sovereignty, autonomy, and rational and pragmatic political theory--were foregrounded in novel legal and intellectual instruments that stabilized church and state into the modern era. Much as Schilling earlier emphasized the constructive aspect of the Kirchenspaltung, he argues that confessionalization in international relations did not serve to disrupt European dynamism, but instead proved to be a motor of it.
There can be no question that Schilling is an authority on each of the topics covered in his lectures; his own, entirely justified, propensity to self-reference can be taken as evidence to this effect. Moreover, any critical comment must allow for the format of Schilling's ideas. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that brevity has forced compromise on points not all readers will find appropriate. Most generally, because Schilling's story is driven by confessionalism qua differentiation cast as a positive because dynamic force, he never asks the entirely legitimate question of whether that dynamism might possibly have been had without disruptions--not to mention the atrocities--that were part of the Confessional Age. Indeed, when we consider that state-building and internal cohesion had other motors prior to and independent of confessionalism--warfare, economic fluctuation, nationalism; when we consider that migration, both religiously conditioned and otherwise, had fostered the dissemination of technical knowledge and the development of dealing with minorities before the Reformation and in spite of it; and finally, when we recognize, as Schilling does as well, that the categories employed to overcome the confessionalization of international relations were around before the Union or the League, we are forced to question, in a way Schilling does not, what the relative contribution of confessionalism to each of these was. Such a consideration would necessitate modesty in any positive valorization of confessionalism's dynamism.
Finally, readers should not be disappointed to find that Schilling treats issues already largely familiar from his other publications; he rarely treads on ground not covered elsewhere. While he does gesture towards research on Catholic confessional migration, for instance, he does not seek to expand our knowledge on that topic. Similarly, Schilling does raise a number of rhetorical questions about the Jews in early modern Europe, which clearly reflects an effort to speak to his initial audience. Yet, there is little sustained interrogation of the good points he raises.
In sum, Schilling concisely limns three major fields of his own research, neatly tied together in a consideration of their contribution to the dynamism that moved Europe from the Middle Ages to global ascendance in the modern era, all in language accessible to any historically interested audience. As such, the book can be recommended to just such an audience. Specialists will, of course, prefer Schilling's own longer works on the same topics. But for quick entry into the thinking of one of the doyens of early modern history, one does not need to look any further.
Notes
[1]. Heinz Schilling, Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung: Eine Fallstudie über das Verhältnis von religiösem und sozialem Wandel in der Frühneuzeit am Beispiel der Grafschaft Lippe (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1981), and "Die Konfessionalisierung im Reich," Historische Zeitschrift 246 (1988): 1-45.
[2]. Heinz Schilling, Niederländische Exulanten im 16. Jahrhundert: Ihre Stellung im Sozialgefüge und im religiösen Leben deutscher und englischer Städte (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1972); for example: idem, "Die niederländischen Exulanten des 16. Jahrhunderts: Ein Beitrag zum Typus der frühneuzeitlichen Konfessionsmigration," Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 43 (1992): 67-78.
[3]. Heinz Schilling, Konfessionalisierung und Staatsinteressen: Internationale Beziehungen 1559-1660 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007).
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Citation:
Sean F. Dunwoody. Review of Schilling, Heinz, Early Modern European Civilization and its Political and Cultural Dynamism.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24065
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