Bossy again, from the same essay: He quotes Oberman’s claim that “in the old dispensation the holiness of the Church and its governors was made manifest by their power to transmit to the body of Christians the condition of peace, and conversely that the absence of peace was an indication of their failure to be holy.” Oberman considers this a separation of sacred and secular, but Bossy doesn’t see it: “Peace in most medieval thinking is not an abstract condition but a state of social relations.” Thus, it cannot “simply by imposed or transmitted from above” but “requires action and collaboration on the part of individuals or groups.”
In this mentality, peace is “not holy in itself but a diagnostic sign or congruous condition of the holy.” By receiving the pax in the mass, the people receive “the bond of peace and charity” and thus are “apt for the most holy mysteries of God.” Thus rituals of social peace came to be seen as possessing intrinsic holiness:
“Just as the holiness of the Eucharist had rubbed off on to the pax which was intended to prepare for it, until this became an acceptable substitute; just as the progress of the fraternity had tended to confuse the line of distinction between the sacrum convivium and the straightforward fraternal beanfeast; so the public rituals of social peace had acquired in the common understanding an intrinsic holiness which was exposed to view, in sixteenth-century France, by the outrage which attended the refusal of Protestants to participate in them, and fuelled the indignation with which Catholics united to exterminate the sacrilegious body from their midst.” Bossy revealingly quotes an Irish Protestant study from Catholic Belfast, whose family was told to leave because their very presence “spoiled the peace of the parish.”
Bossy draws two conclusions from this. First “that peace is holy, not simply because it is an effect of the presence of the sacraments and most specifically of the supreme physical embodiment of the holiness of the God of Christians, the Host, but also because it is what he will not expect to prevail in the ordinary course of life.” Second, “the ritual which achieves [peace] is an essential part of the process by which he is saved.” A traditional Catholic is a “federal theologian, a man in possession of a covenant; but his foedus is more like a covenant of peace than a covenant of grace . . . . For all of them the reconciliation of man to man is the condition of the reconciliation of man to God, and for the faithful to whom they spoke it would seem clear that it was a sufficient condition. Those who sabotage the ritual by which peace is secured among men are obstructing the community in the fulfillment of its part in a social contract with God, and threatening the eternal damnation of all.”
The Reformers, on this reading, do not introduce a new covenant but destroy an old one: “In the field we have surveyed, Luther’s achievement was to have separated the cockle from the wheat: his theology of salvation severed a bond between the holy and actual states of human relations . . . . the religious community and the particular fraternity abolished, charity excluded from its part in the machinery of salvation, piety in the sense described above (a main issue in the argument about indulgences) eliminated from among the obligations of religion.”
Luther’s insistence on alien, passive sanctity “descended as a drastic dislocation of a partnership between the sacred and the secular; in the social university, it seems to me to justify the claim of Guy Swanson, however incautiously phrased and crudely executed, that the issue in the Reformation was immanence versus transcendence.” One of the casualties of the post-Reformation conflicts, Bossy says, was “the covenant of peace.” People pursued holiness in the Renaissance and Reformation, but this, Bossy says, was because “holiness was withdrawing from contact with the social, as with the physical, world.”
Several comments on this challenging assessment. First, Bossy is right on target in assessing the social effects of the Reformation by reference to shifts in the understanding of holiness. Second, his characterization of Reformation views of the social dimension of holiness is very one-sided. Reformers emphasized the corporate dimensions of the Mass, arguably more than their late medieval opponents. Third, while Bossy may be correct that the Reformation severed the covenant of peace, that is not necessarily to judge the Reformation negatively. Jesus brings not peace but a sword as well.
On the plus side, though, Bossy’s point that medieval covenant theology emphasized the social covenant of peace rather than a purely vertical covenant of grace is a very intriguing point. As is the fact that while “covenant of peace” occurs in the Bible four times, “covenant of grace” never does.