Crisis Magazine has published today my latest, on the question of Henry VIII’s religious beliefs and whether or not he was a Protestant. Here’s a snippet:
If you leave the authority of the pope to one side, can what Henry believed post 1533 be labeled as Catholic? Some scholars have tried—most recently George W. Bernard, who has written a book and several articles arguing that Henry was an “Erasmian” Christian before the break with Rome and remained one afterward. The idea is that, like the Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus, Henry was skeptical of much medieval piety (images, relics, pilgrimages, Purgatory) but did not go to the extremes of Luther or, later, Calvin. In this line of thinking, Henry’s belief in the Mass, prayers for the dead, and his retention (however attenuated) of images render his beliefs “Catholic,” at least as late medieval humanists might have understood them.
The problem with this idea, as the Cambridge historian Richard Rex has pointed out, is that Erasmus, while he wanted to reform Catholic devotion more toward the Bible and was certainly skeptical of much medieval piety, rejected the outright iconoclasm of the Reformation and disliked war, the execution of heretics, and dogmatic conflicts, all of which Henry indulged in liberally. For my part, I simply don’t believe the category is helpful for distinguishing between Catholics and Protestants, since humanism influenced too many people in late medieval Europe for it to be a meaningful way of distinguishing between the two.
Read it all here.
