Schools will spend a term on Wittenberg and not an hour on Kassel, as if the only religious rupture worth a citizen’s memory were a new church and not a claimed reformation of knowledge and polity together. That silence is not neutrality: it trains the young to read the seventeenth-century as a straight road from pulpit to laboratory and to treat every other demand upon the heavens as folklore. A republic that educates by such a map leaves its people fluent in confessions and illiterate in the very traditions that refused to sunder the reform of the soul from the reform of the city. A republic that undertakes to form citizens, and not merely to drill functionaries, is answerable for the map of the past it places in their hands. When that map is drawn so that the Lutheran Reformation stands forth in every schoolroom as the great religious crisis of the sixteenth century, while the Rosicrucian eruption of 1614-1620 is left in the outer darkness as a curiosity for antiquaries and occultists, the commonwealth has not merely omitted a footnote. It has excavated a void in knowledge and called the vacancy enlightenment.
Consider first the asymmetry of the syllabus. Luther’s theses, the Diet of Worms, the princely confiscations, the vernacular Bible, the wars of religion, these are rehearsed until they acquire the hardness of granite in the young mind. They are so rehearsed because they can be made to serve a tidy procession: medieval superstition giving way to conscience, conscience to critique, critique to the laboratory and the secular state. The tale is rationalist in its marrow and materialist in its destination. It requires that religion be treated as a public quarrel about churches and princes, after which the serious business of history may proceed as the emancipation of matter and method from every lingering enchantment. Into such a tale the Fama Fraternitatis, the Confessio, and the Chymical Wedding will not go. They announce no new established church. They crown no elector with a catechism. They speak instead of an invisible college, of a general reformation of knowledge and of polity, of a marriage of wisdom and power under the figure of Sophia, of a restoration that would touch not only altar and throne but the very constitution of nature and of man. A history written to celebrate the disenchantment of the world must either travesty such documents or pass them over in a silence that pretends to be taste.
That silence is unbecoming of a republic for a reason deeper than completeness. A free people is not formed by being told that their ancestors moved, by an inevitable gradient, from myth to mechanism. Classical republicanism itself never consented to that gradient. It bound the city to a kosmos: to measure, to Dikē watching the judgments of kings, to piety enacted in the open, to the conviction that the reform of the soul and the reform of the city are not two labors but one. The Rosicrucian moment, whatever its extravagances of secrecy and millenarian heat, belongs to the same refusal. It attacked corrupt authority and demanded that learning and government be made new together It would not permit the heavens to be dismissed as scenery while men rearranged their statutes upon a floor of dead matter. To teach the Reformation as the sole religious revolution of that age, and then to leap, with a schoolmaster’s complacency, into Bacon as prophet of utility and Newton as liquidator of mystery, is to amputate the very tradition in which later republicans still drew breath when they spoke of virtue, of civil religion, of a harmony between divine order and human association. The citizen is left imagining that all non-materialist politics after Luther is either confessional reaction or private eccentricity.
This omission is not a mere accident of textbooks. It is the pedagogical expression of a metaphysics. Rationalism, once it has appointed itself the official interpreter of the past, cannot afford to linger over an episode in which Protestants, Paracelsians, pansophists, and political millenarians jointly imagined that nature herself might be renovated and that an unseen fraternity might shame the visible colleges of Europe. Such an episode threatens the dogma that history’s meaning is the progressive expulsion of the invisible. It threatens, likewise, the dogma that the only serious religious history is the history of churches that command pews and taxes. The Rosicrucian Revolution, if we may restore the name to that brief incandescent interval before the Bohemian adventure collapsed into the Thirty Years’ War, was a revolution in the imagination of order. It asked whether knowledge might be a civic sacrament and whether the reformation of Christendom might be more than the multiplication of confessions. A university that will discuss Wittenberg by the week and cannot spare an hour for Cassel, Tübingen, Heidelberg, and the winter king has decided, without confessing the decision, that imagination is not a public fact.
Yet a republic lives by public facts of precisely that kind. Its laws are parchment; its endurance is a shared vision of what may be asked of a citizen and of what the city owes the measure above it. When the schools deliver only the Lutheran drama and the materialist aftermath, they produce a people expert in the quarrels of pulpits and destitute of the memory that Europe once dreamed, in the same generation, of an invisible reformation no less political than spiritual. That destitution is not neutrality. It is a formation. It trains the mind to read every later appeal to kosmos, to civil piety, to the marriage of wisdom and power, as either priestcraft or folklore. It leaves the forum intellectually disarmed before those who would fill the vacated heavens with party or with blood. And it is, in the old and exact sense, unbecoming: unsuited to the dignity of a commonwealth whose citizens are asked to hold up the sky in daylight, and who cannot do so if they have been taught that the sky was never anyone’s concern but the clergyman’s, and that even he was a prelude to the machine.
