{"id":72215,"date":"2025-11-18T01:00:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T06:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=72215"},"modified":"2025-11-17T10:07:49","modified_gmt":"2025-11-17T15:07:49","slug":"qotd-echoes-of-the-thirty-years-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/11\/18\/qotd-echoes-of-the-thirty-years-war\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Echoes of the Thirty Years’ War"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It’s much easier to attack cultural institutions than political ones, and because the Church was also a political institution \u2014 a big one \u2014 it was convenient to attack a guy like Cardinal Wolsey, Tetzel the Indulgence Merchant, and so on. You can always frame it in the traditional medieval way: “The king has been led astray by his evil counsellors”. It’s not a coincidence that Reformed polities were also the most politically efficient; the Prods won the Thirty Years’ War, thanks in no small part to very Catholic France (under Cardinal<\/em> Richelieu) adopting Protestant attitudes, strategies, and tactics.<\/p>\n

The analogy only extends so far, of course. Hillaire Belloc has argued<\/a> that the dissolution of the monasteries in England kicked out one of the three legs supporting English culture \u2014 by putting all that land and money under the State’s direct control (that “Tudor revolution in government<\/a>” again), the State and the Economy are inextricably merged. It’s proto-fascism (recall that The Servile State<\/em> was written in 1912). Not only is this true, it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Back in 1912, the Church was still alive as a cultural force. The Media was still at least somewhat capitalist \u2014 in competition for eyeballs \u2014 and in many cases led The Opposition, which also still existed as a cultural force.<\/p>\n

Nowadays, of course, not only are the State and the Economy indistinguishable, they’re also indistinguishable from The Media. There IS no “opposition”; whatever anemic resistance to The State is stage managed like pro wrestling. Real dissidents are in the positions of recusants in Tudor England, except that the Church, instead of sending priests to minister to us in secret, is sending battalions of Inquisitors to help hunt us down.<\/p>\n

In short, there\u2019s no entry point for a new “Reformation”. As bad as the Period of the Wars of Religion was, gifted leaders had structural<\/em> ways to achieve their objectives and keep the peace. Henry of Navarre could proclaim that “Paris is worth a mass”; Cardinal Richelieu could proclaim raison d’etat<\/em>; the old Peace of Augsburg system \u2014 cuius regio; eius religio<\/em> \u2014 could work well enough with a prince who understood his people and chose not to push too hard. “Separation of Church and State” wasn’t articulated as a formal political principle until the 19th century (and only there because it was badly misconstrued), but as a practical<\/em> solution to politico-cultural problems it works just fine …<\/p>\n

… provided you’ve got the structures in place to handle it, and we don’t. The Church, the State, the Economy, the Media, Academia, Technology … who can say where the one ends and the other begins? It’s all Poz, and there’s no aspect of our lives that the Poz doesn’t touch, because instead of separate and often competing socio-governmental structures, they’ve all merged. They’re ALL Poz.<\/p>\n

Severian, “Reformation”, Founding Questions<\/em><\/a>, 2022-03-07.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s much easier to attack cultural institutions than political ones, and because the Church was also a political institution \u2014 a big one \u2014 it was convenient to attack a guy like Cardinal Wolsey, Tetzel the Indulgence Merchant, and so on. You can always frame it in the traditional medieval way: “The king has been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,62,1117,7,41,11],"tags":[1153,360,570,1562,1462],"class_list":["post-72215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-europe","category-france","category-history","category-quotations","category-religion","tag-30yearswar","tag-christianity","tag-england","tag-reformation","tag-severian"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-iML","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72215"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99113,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72215\/revisions\/99113"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}