CONFESSIONAL EUROPE Heinz Schilling (Humboldt-Universitiit zu Berlin)

Between 1560 and 1650, Europe's history was shaped by what we call "confession," the modern variant of . A confession was defined by an explicit statement of doctrine (Lat., confessio), of which the most significant were: for , the Confession of Augsburg (1530) and the Book of Concord (1580); for the Reformed (Calvinist) confession, the Helvetic Confessions (1536, 1566), the Zu­ rich Consensus (1549), and the canons of Dordrecht (1619); for , the Book of Common Prayer (1549) and the Thirty-Nine Articles (1563); and for Catholicism, the Council of Trent's doctrinal canons, especially the "Tridentine Profession of Faith [professio fidei tridentina]" of 1564 and certain papal statements. Based on their re­ spective confessions of faith, the three great confessions (four, includ­ ing Anglicanism) developed into internally coherent and externally ex­ clusive communities distinct in institutions, membership, and belief. Each in its own way, their churches entered into alliances with the early modern states, the coercive power of which enhanced the churches' ability to manage religion, though with results that usually lagged far behind their aims. The confessions also formed a "balance­ of-confessions" connected to the European balance-of-power that was forming in these same decades.

1. THE CONCEPT OF CONFESSIONALIZATION1

Europe housed other, non-confessional religious communities, notably the Anabaptists and other heirs of the radical , and there were always counter-trends to orthodoxies within the confessional churches. Interconfessional contacts and extraconfessional move­ ments nevertheless tended to be limited to private circles, at least until 1640 or so, when the process of deconfessionalization began to give them greater freedom. Beyond the Christian confessions vital Jewish communities existed in many European countries, though they, too, 642 HEINZ SCHILLING were isolated and deprived of any chance to influence the larger Euro­ pean societies of this era.2 The term "confessional Europe" for the era following the Reforma­ tion does not represent an idealist denigration of demographic, eco­ nomic, political, and social factors in favor of theological or religious ones. On the contrary, the emphasis on ecclesiastical and religious structures and tendencies arises from reflections on the sociology of re­ ligion in premodern Europe in general and on the initial phase of Euro­ pean modernity in particular. They help us to overcome, on the one hand, the Marxists' demotion of religion to a mask for the real driving forces of history and, on the other, the idealist approach that has long dominated the humanities and theological studies on both sides of the Atlantic. Instead, we seek a historically accurate conception of the so­ cial effects of religion and the churches.

In the social constellation we call "premodern Europe," religion, espe­ cially in the structured form of a "confession," was a dominant ele­ ment in a complex of factors, each of which can be considered-as in a medical syndrome-both separately and in its interaction with the oth­ ers. Whereas the modern understanding of religion and church holds them to be mere subordinate parts of a larger secular system, in those days they were considered central, load-bearing pillars of the entire so­ cial order. Accordingly, religious change was also social change, or, as the seventeenth-century German lawyers put it, "religion is the bond of society [religio vinculum societatis]."

This kind of structural-functional approach to religion and church of­ fers us perspectives and possibilities for comparison and evaluation un­ matched by either materialist or idealist approaches. It demonstrates, for example, how the history of confessional Europe meant in the long run a tremendous revolutionary shift. More importantly, it rejects the long dominant view of post-Reformation religious history as a matter of competition and mutual exclusion and emphasizes the confessions' structural and functional similarities rather than on the differences among them. The confessional hypothesis focuses both on the cul­ tural, intellectual, social, and political functions of religion and confes­ sion within the early modern social order and on the confessions' roles as spurs and barriers to the emergence of modernity. These are two sides of the historical paradigm we call "confessionalization." It holds that the late sixteenth-century emergence of confessions was one of the