CHAPTER 11
£Secularization and Philosophical
Meta-territoriality
The shifting power of the church was bound to change intellectual life. This
was the material base on which most intellectual networks had centered, and
these networks would necessarily respond to the closing of some opportunities
and the opening of others. The intellectual revolutions were not simply a matter
of breaking down the alliance of church and state which had imposed authori-
tarian control over the limits of thought. In the narrow sense, the liberalization
of thinking had less effect on creativity than one might suppose. Many epi-
sodes of creativity had gone on within the authoritarian church, and when
liberalization came, the most extreme freethinkers were not generally the most
innovative, in either philosophy or science. Often their products were narrow
and banal, while greater subtlety in constructing philosophy came from the
conservatives defending religion, or in cautious halfway houses. Freedom of
thought is a wonderful thing; but it is realistic to recognize that it is not the
main engine of creativity.
Nor can we attribute the major changes to Protestantism. For one thing
the timing is wrong. Luther nailed up his theses on the Wittenberg church door
in 1517; by 1560 the major Protestant sects and the lines of the national
churches had been established. But the thought of the 1500s still moved largely
in well-worn paths: Humanists, Aristoteleans, scholastics, Cabalists, mystics.
The big reorganization of philosophy did not come until the mid-1600s. Of
course there were Protestant thinkers; but they were mainly concerned with
theological issues and biblical texts. Erasmus, Luther, Melancthon, Calvin,
Schwenckfeld, and Franck do not constitute a revolution in philosophy. The
Reformation increased the particularistic emphasis in thought, not the abstract
level where philosophical and scientific creativity takes place.
The Protestant-centered line of argument rests on two false premises: that
religious control is inherently antithetical to intellectual innovation, and that
Protestantism is more liberal or less authoritarian than Catholicism. The
second was certainly not true at any time before 1700. The notion that it was
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