Reformation

The Reformation stands as the historical hinge on which much of City of God's theological argument turns. It is invoked not as a distant event but as the moment when Christianity's political character became explicit, the point from which the novel's characters trace the lineage of their own religious crises. For the novel's central figures—an Episcopal priest losing his faith and a rabbi who embodies a progressive, questioning Judaism—the Reformation represents both the origin of their tradition's divisions and a model for how religious authority is perpetually contested and remade.

The Reformation as Political Origin

The novel's most sustained treatment of the Reformation comes in a profession of faith delivered to the bishop's examiners, where the speaker traces the entire arc of Christian history as a political creation. The desire to perpetuate the authority of Jesus, he argues, continued through the Reformation and the creation of Protestant sects, which proposed a kind of residual gnosis in protest against the sacramental accumulations of a churchly bureaucracy. What is now Christianity, with all its resonance as a belief and a rich and complex culture, is described as a political creation with a political history—a politically triumphant Jesus created from the conflicts of early Christianity, sustained from the emperor Constantine's conversion in the fourth century through the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the contests and alliances with kings and emperors. The Reformation appears here as the latest chapter in this long story of power, the moment when Christianity's active participation in the wars among states and the rule of populations became unmistakable. This is not neutral history but a confession offered under examination, a priest's acknowledgment that his own tradition is inseparable from the politics of its formation.

The Reformation in the Crisis of Faith

The Reformation also surfaces in the novel's most intimate theological exchanges, where it becomes a shorthand for the problem of religious authority itself. In one conversation, the question of whether faith must be blind leads to a meditation on how God's authority reduces all believers to beggarly submission. The speaker asks whether, if faith is valid in all its forms, choosing Jesus is merely an aesthetic choice—and if not, how the elect can be distinguished from the misguided others except by the story they cherish. The Reformation haunts this line of questioning as the historical moment when one story of God split into many, when the question of whose truth is true became unanswerable by institutional fiat. The novel's characters find themselves stranded between the consolations of tradition and the impossibility of certainty, a condition the Reformation made visible centuries earlier.

The Reformation and the Sense of Reversal

A darker note is struck when the Reformation is linked to a sense that civilization itself is running backwards. In a moment of shared despair, a character asks whether time is a loop, whether everything seems to be running in reverse, whether civilization is in reverse. The Reformation, which once promised renewal and return to authentic faith, here becomes part of a larger pattern of atavism—the suspicion that God truly belongs to the atavists, and that faith, whatever it is, does what it does regardless of human hopes. The response is bleak: if that is what faith is and what faith does, then the questioners are stranded. The Reformation, which began as a protest against accumulated tradition, is folded into a cyclical view of history in which every reform eventually hardens into the very thing it opposed.

Doubt as the Reformation's Legacy

The novel's most explicit valuation of the Reformation's legacy comes in an address to a conference of American Studies in Religion, where doubt itself is named the great civilizer of the twentieth century. The speaker argues that doubt—the constantly debated and flexible inner condition of theological uncertainty, the wish to believe in balance with rueful or nervous or grieving skepticism—has held people in thrall to ethical behavior, while true believers of whatever stamp have done the murdering. The impulse to excommunicate, to satanize, to eradicate, to ethnically cleanse is identified as a religious impulse; in the practice and politics of religion, God has always been a license to kill. The Reformation, as the great historical rupture that multiplied competing claims to God's authority, stands behind this diagnosis. The speaker trusts those who gravitate toward symbolic comfort rather than those who reaffirm historic guarantees—the uneasy promulgators of traditional established religion who are not in lockstep with its customs, who are chafing under doctrinal pronouncements, who read Scripture with Coleridge's willing suspension of disbelief. This is the Reformation's true inheritance: not a new orthodoxy but a permanent state of compromised faith, requiring something more of those who hold it.

The Reformation in Personal Transformation

The Reformation even reaches into the novel's most personal register, the love between the ex-priest and the rabbi. On the eve of their marriage, before his conversion studies are complete, the priest confesses that he has never felt as completely, wholly Christian in his life as he does now, studying to be a Jew. The warning that follows—that he might not want to say that to anyone else—underscores how the Reformation's logic of pure faith versus institutional belonging continues to shape individual conscience. The Reformation, which began by asking what authentic Christianity was, here returns as a personal paradox: the man feels most Christian precisely when he is leaving Christianity behind. The novel thus treats the Reformation not as a settled historical event but as a living question, one that continues to generate both political history and personal crisis, both the license to kill and the courage to doubt.