The Reformation as an Augustinian Civil War — and Secularization

Farrell’s most audacious claim is that the Reformation was not a break with the Augustinian West but a civil war within it — Luther and Calvin radicalizing one side of Augustine’s own predestinarian and simplicity-driven theology against another — and that the same dialectic, having consumed its Catholic and Protestant hosts, issues finally in secularization. This file expounds that claim as Farrell’s thesis, the least verifiable layer of the whole book, and sets against it the historiographical objections it must face.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (modern theological literature; historiography) — Farrell’s thesis, not Church dogma

The Reformation as Intra-Augustinian Conflict

The boldest move in God, History, and Dialectic is Farrell’s reading of the Reformation. On the ordinary account the Reformation is a rupture: Protestantism breaks with medieval Catholicism. Farrell denies that this is the deepest description. The Reformation, he argues, is better understood as a civil war within Augustinism — a conflict between two parties who share the same Augustinian premises and quarrel over which side of them to press (Farrell, GHD, Vol. III, History: The Theological Pathology of the Second Europe).

The reasoning is that Augustine’s own theology contains a tension that his heirs could develop in opposite directions: his doctrine of grace, predestination, and the bondage of the will points one way (toward the Reformers’ sola gratia, unconditional election, and the enslaved will — Luther’s De servo arbitrio, Calvin’s double predestination), while his doctrine of the Church, the sacraments, and the mediation of grace through institutional means points another (toward the Tridentine Catholic settlement). Both sides are Augustinian; the Reformation is the moment when the two strands, long held in an uneasy synthesis, fly apart and make war on each other. Luther and Calvin are, in Farrell’s reading, more consistently Augustinian on grace than their Catholic opponents, not less — which is why the quarrel is a family quarrel, a dialectical opposition generated from within a shared premise, rather than the intrusion of something new (Farrell, GHD, Vol. III).

This is, it must be said, a genuinely interesting thesis, and it is not without support: that Luther was an Augustinian friar formed on Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings, that the Reformation debates over grace and predestination were fought largely with Augustinian weapons, and that Jansenism later reproduced the same tension inside Catholicism, are commonplaces of the history of doctrine. Farrell’s contribution is to read the whole conflict as the dialectic working itself out — opposition generating opposition — from the original installation of dialectic in the Augustinian doctrine of God (see What “Dialectic” Means).

Secularization as the Dialectic Consuming Itself

The final stage is secularization. Having set the two Augustinian parties at war, the dialectic, Farrell argues, does not stop; it consumes its own theological content. The endless internal opposition — Catholic against Protestant, and each against itself — corrodes the credibility of the shared theological framework, and the dialectic, now detached from its theological object, continues as pure method: rationalism, the Enlightenment, the Hegelian and Marxist dialectics of history, and finally a secular modernity that is the Second Europe’s theology with the God subtracted but the dialectical logic intact. Modern secular dialectic, on this reading, is the distant grandchild of the dialectic first lodged in the Augustinian Trinity — theology’s pathology outliving theology itself (Farrell, GHD, Vol. III). This is why the title binds God, History, and Dialectic together: the dialectic that began in the doctrine of God ends as the engine of a godless history.

The Historiographical Objections

This is the layer of the book where the distance from responsible historiography is greatest, and honesty requires stating the objections plainly (per METHODOLOGY.md, §4.2):

Radical mono-causality over half a millennium. To derive the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and secular modernity from a fifth-century Trinitarian premise is to compress an enormous, contingent, multi-causal history into the unfolding of a single idea. Historians would insist on the roles of the printing press, the rise of the territorial state and its quarrels with Rome, economic and social transformation, humanist scholarship, the corruption and reform of ecclesial institutions, nationalism, and sheer contingency — none reducible to divine simplicity. Max Weber’s and others’ accounts of secularization, whatever their own contestability, at least reckon with this density; Farrell’s does not.
Selectivity. The thesis works by selecting the theological thread and treating it as the whole rope. Where the evidence runs the other way — Byzantine theologians reading Aquinas with profit (Plested), the pro-Nicene commonality of Augustine and the Greeks (Ayres, Barnes) — the frame has no comfortable place for it (see The Scholarly Debate).
Unfalsifiability. A thesis that can absorb any subsequent development as another expression of “the dialectic working itself out” risks explaining everything and therefore nothing. The more totalizing the claim, the less it can be tested — which is precisely the intellectual habit that this collection, in treating Farrell’s second authorial career, flags as characteristic of his most speculative work (see The Second Career).

What Survives, and How to Hold It

What survives the objections is modest but real. The observation that the Reformation was fought largely on Augustinian ground, and that intra-Augustinian tensions over grace shaped both Protestant and Catholic developments, is a legitimate and illuminating point of the history of doctrine. The larger claim — that a single Trinitarian decision causes, by dialectical necessity, the Reformation and secular modernity — is Farrell’s thesis at its most sweeping and least verifiable, and it should be received as such: a provocative interpretive vision, not a demonstrated history.

For the Orthodox reader the practical upshot is the (a)/(b)/(c) discipline the whole collection keeps (see What the Reader Can Take With Confidence): (a) the Filioque and absolute divine simplicity are errors the Church confesses; (b) that these errors generate scholasticism, the Reformation, and secularization as a single dialectic is Farrell’s private thesis; (c) the historians dispute the mono-causal method root and branch. To confuse (a) with (b) — to think that rejecting the Filioque commits one to Farrell’s total history of the West — is the characteristic error the collection exists to prevent.

References

Farrell, Joseph P. God, History, and Dialectic, Vol. III: History: The Theological Pathology of the Second Europe. 1997; 4-vol. ed. 2016.
Plested, Marcus. Orthodox Readings of Aquinas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Ayres, Lewis. Augustine and the Trinity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Barnes, Michel René. “De Régnon Reconsidered.” Augustinian Studies 26/2 (1995): 51–79.