Knowledge Is Not Authority
We have infinite trouble in solving man-made mysteries; it is only when we set out to discover the secrets of God that our difficulties disappear. —S. Clemens
From Voices of Thunder.
The Protestant Reformation that swept through Europe in the sixteenth century threw into doubt long-established religious and cultural traditions, raising questions about an individual’s access to truth. On what should people base their beliefs? Could they trust inherited forms of knowledge, passed down by learned authorities since time immemorial?
It seems to me that just about everyone who has written about the Protestant Reformation has inherited these rhetorical questions—in nearly their exact phrasings—from some learned authorities since the clichéd ‘time immemorial.’ But it is misleading, I think, to suggest that most sectarians had the lofty philosophical goal of challenging ‘inherited forms of knowledge’ (academics write this way, perhaps, because they know that the Enlightenment is coming in their next chapter); they were, rather, challenging who could interpret that inherited knowledge—scriptural knowledge at that—especially when they had a specific “who” in mind: the repressive, corrupt, hierarchical, and kind of flamboyant Catholic Church.
Protestant iconoclasm stripped church buildings bare, whitewashing walls and throwing out crucifixes and statues. More significantly, however, it also stripped bare the soul of the individual believer. No longer able to rely on a priest to act as an intermediary, she stood alone before God. ‘The thoughts and intents of the heart can be known to no-one but God,’ said Martin Luther, at once establishing the necessity of freedom of conscience and the loneliness that came with that freedom. Another person cannot ‘go to hell or heaven for me’, he pointed out, and just as ‘little can he believe or disbelieve for me’. It follows that ‘no-one shall and can command the soul, unless he can show it the way to heaven; but this no man can do, only God.’
Indeed, we struggle to respect the isolation and loneliness of individuality. It makes us take for granted the fact that we have overcome it, through imitation, communicative movement, voice, representation, and human language, the last of these making up 100% of the Bible—that sine qua non of transmitted, inherited, linguistic knowledge from otherwise omniscient or dead authority figures (wherein, I am told, is a story of a man who is indeed said to have ‘gone to heaven for me’).
Newly disconnected from rituals such as confession, Protestants could not rely on actions or institutions to establish their spiritual status. Instead, they had to look within themselves. Faith was not something that could be inherited and nor was it a way of life. It was not even a matter of assent, in a purely cognitive sense. True belief, instead, operated at the level of individual conviction, and to be authentic it had to be rooted in the heart and the soul. Knowing about God counted for nothing; what mattered was having a personal, heartfelt experience of God.
I would call this a claimancy, from a pretender. It is not an argument at all against ‘inherited forms of knowledge’. These folks will go on to spread the good word and give ‘testimony,’ for pete’s sake. It is, rather, a claim to center authority on the sovereign individual and away from the (corrupt and repressive) institution (and those individuals that make it up).
Power and authority are the problem, not knowledge.
