Witnessing Reformation

Amid the Protestant Reformation, John Calvin’s preaching in Geneva was a shining light throughout Europe. One of his antagonists/admirers was fellow protestant Michael Servetus.  In 1553, Servetus, while escaping from Catholic imprisonment sneaked into Geneva and sat in the rear of Calvin’s church to hear him preach.  He was spotted by Calvin, who regarded him as a heretic and had him arrested and burned at the stake.  The year before, Catholic Venice had expelled the Jesuits in a dispute with the Pope, and previously Venice had drowned heretics in the lagoon with a stone around their neck (a scriptural punishment.)  Less than 20 years before, Thomas More had been beheaded in England for refusing to recognize the king’s divorce on religious grounds.  The Inquisition was under way in Spain and Italy.  And 50 years later, all Europe was aflame with the 30 Years War, which drew in countries from Spain to Scandinavia and caused the death of one-third of the population of Germany.  Atrocities were so common that people stayed home, and the modern hymnal was born as a substitute for group worship.  It would only end with the Peace of Westphalia, dubbed “the peace of exhaustion” at the time, which gave us church-state separation and the birth of the modern nation state.  Even then, Westphalia required three simultaneous conferences of negotiators, each first negotiating among themselves then negotiating their results with the other two conferences.

Meanwhile, sitting at the edge of Europe, the Ottoman Empire, predecessor of modern Turkey and the superpower of the time, debated whether to take advantage of the European strife and invade.  Other than a brief, bloody war with the Hapsburgs in Hungary, they did not.  They had their own internal political conflicts at the time, and for us that was lucky.  For had they intervened, the fighting Europeans would have undoubtedly coalesced to resist; the emergence of church-state separation at the Peace of Westphalia would have been aborted or indefinitely delayed; the legitimacy of absolute monarchy and of religious intolerance would have been reaffirmed.  In short, all the necessary steps, including the exhaustion and loss of legitimacy of religious intolerance, that led to the Enlightenment and to the American and French Revolutions might have been indefinitely delayed or might never have occurred.  I say we were lucky; the Germans of the time would have felt far differently.

That is the kind of debate we in Europe and America are having with ourselves about the goings on in Egypt, the Middle East and Afghanistan.  Atrocities are occurring, religious intolerance and strife are everywhere, absolutist regimes are struggling viciously for their existence.  We are justifiably horrified by each occurrence and wish we could do something, anything, to end the violence.  What we don’t “get” is that we are witnessing the bloody birth of a modern Middle East.  Islamist traditionalists and absolute monarchies everywhere are feeling the pressures of modernity and are fighting fiercely for their existence against equally violent reformers.  Many Middle East scholars have dubbed this the Arab Civil War, an aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, but that does not go far enough.  It is far closer to an Islamic Protestant Reformation.  And like the European Protestant Reformation, if left alone, it too may require 100 years of bloody conflict ending in exhaustion for its resolution.

It is highly tempting to treat the whole process as a necessary evil, required for the traditional Middle East to catch up with the rest of the world.  But we live in an interconnected, global world where what happens in Egypt or Syria or Iran has world-wide repercussions.  Extremists on each side in each country struggle through lobbying or through terrorist acts to capture our attention and gain our support.  If we could build a wall around the Middle East, we might.  But we can’t.

The wisest course seems the approach we are pursuing now, though it is morally painful and criticized by many good hearted people.  Intervene only when we absolutely must, and then, only reluctantly and cautiously.  We are observers of a process we cannot fully understand, and too much intervention is possibly harmful to us, to the participants, and to their descendants.  The difficulty, as always, is to settle the meaning of “must.”  Are excessive atrocities by themselves sufficient for justification, or are national security interests required?   After all, atrocities to the point of exhaustion and revulsion are what led to our modern world.  A constant pressure to minimize them without ourselves becoming just another participant seems called for.  We cannot become either just another warring faction or the aborter of necessary resolution.  We are, and must continue to be, only witnesses to the birth of another modern world.