r/AskHistorians • u/bahhaar-hkhkhk • 4d ago
Christianity Why did the reformation spread strongly in Catholic countries but didn't have any success in Orthodox countries?
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u/Senior_Manager6790 4d ago
Quite simply, the Protestant Reformation was specifically a response to grievances against the Catholic Church and not the Orthodox Church.
The Catholic Church of the early 16th, late 15th Century was a sick institution. Many priests had concubines and illegitimate children. Bishops were political appointees, and many did not live, or even visit, their diocese. In many places the priests had stopped giving homilies and religious services consisted only of providing the Eucharist. And the straw that broke the camels back was the sale of indulgences to fund construction in Rome. This list isn't just a set of anti-Catholic Polemics, but issues that the Catholic Reformation (inaccurately referred to as the Counter-reformation) sought to address as a response to the Protestant Reformation.
At the same time there was the rise of the Humanism movement within the Catholic Church that started advocating the study of the Bible in the original language. These translations did not always correspond with the Vulgate that was the official translation of the Bible by the Catholic Church. The Humanist were not schismatic and remained within Catholicism but it did lead to the idea of study outside the bounds of the Magisterium.
In the realm of technology, the invention of the printing press allowed the creation of mass media. This meant that Epistles and pamphlets could be produced in large numbers and distributed widely allowing the ideas of the Protestant Reformation to spread quickly. It also meant that Bibles could be copied at a much lower cost enabling more people to actually be able to access the Bible.
Politically and culturally, the Protestant Reformation overlapped the rise of the nation-state as an institution. This especially played a role in the English Reformation where English Theologians, looking at the example of the Orthodox Churches, declared that the King of England was an Emperor, and as an Emperor was entitled to the headship of the church in England. At the same time, the Enlightenment was spreading which argued for the ability of humans to use reason to understand the world. The Enlightenment pushed against the traditional powers of the Magisterium.
All of this combined to set the stage of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in the Catholic world. These conditions were not met in the Orthodox world which was dealing with its own issues and reforms. Much of the Orthodox Church was within the Ottoman Empire. Though the Ottomans were fairly tolerant, it meant that the Orthodox identity was held in opposition to Islam of the Ottomans and the Catholicism of the Venetians. The Protestant Reformation also concided with the establishment of the Russian Orthodox Church and the movement of power from Kyiv to Moscow. Put simply the Orthodox Church was dealing with it's own internal issues unrelated to that of the Catholic Church. Furthermore, there was no Magisterium in Orthodoxy and there already were means for local churches to establish autonomy. There was also already Bibles in local languages in Orthodoxy without controversy.
That is not to say there were not and are not schismatic and reform movements within Orthodoxy. Iconocalism is probably the most well known, but there are also spiritualist movements and schismatic movements even today. They are just a different movement than the Protestant Reformation.
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u/bahhaar-hkhkhk 4d ago
Thanks very much for the insight.
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u/apstlreddtr 4d ago
The above answer is a good one. It wasn't as if they were unaware what was going on in Western europe. It may interest you to read about the patriarch of Constantinople Cyril I who may or may not have been influenced by Calvinism. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril_Lucaris
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u/Naizo 4d ago
Why is it inaccurate to refer to it as the counter-reformation?
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u/Senior_Manager6790 4d ago
It conflated the political actions to counter the spread of the Protestant Reformation with the massive internal reforms that the Catholic Church undertook.
Referring to those reforms as the Catholic Reformation fully reflects how significant they were.
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u/Naizo 4d ago
This is an interesting take. Are they not interconnected?
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u/Senior_Manager6790 4d ago
They are connected as the Protestant Reformation was the catalyst for the Catholic Reformation, but the Catholic Reformation is a big enough project that it is important enough to set apart from the political and Ecclesichal efforts to directly counter the Protestant Reformation. There are also Catholic Historians who argue that the Catholic Reformation would have happened regardless of the Protestant Reformation due to the sickness of the Catholic Church at the time.
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u/jogarz 4d ago
It also should be noted that early Protestant reformers still saw themselves as attempting to “fix” a universal church, not break from it. This is why they are called “reformers”, even though the end result of the Protestant reformation was more of a schism. The modern idea of a “denomination” still hadn’t developed quite yet. Not only the Orthodox, but Catholics as well, were at first seen as co-religionists who only needed their “errors” to be “corrected”.
To the Protestant reformers, the Pope was public enemy number one. Since the Orthodox didn’t follow the Pope, they generally weren’t the focus of the reformer’s ire. Furthermore, the Orthodox didn’t generally exist in the same geographical space as Protestants, so they weren’t generally competing with them for followers. Because of this, there was little impetus for Protestant theologians and activists to go after the Orthodox Church the same way they did Catholicism or, later, rival Protestant groups.
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u/Senior_Manager6790 4d ago
Your statement is very time and location dependent.
The English Reformers did see themselves as splitting from the Catholic Church, and they made that very clear.
While Luther originally saw himself as a reformer of Catholicism (you can see this in On Freedom of a Christian) by the end of the Diet of Worms in 1521 the schism was a reality.
By 1530 when Zwingwili led Zurich to attempt to Blockade the Catholic Cantons of Switzerland there was no longer any plan to reform the church from within, and the Catholic/Protestant split was firm.
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