Chapter 3 - Three Revolutions

 Chapter 3 - Three Revolutions

 

“Princes are not bound to give an account of their Actions but to God Alone”

 

Charles I of England (1600-1649)

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History has always been a turmoil, and whatever simple stories we tell from the maelstrom are never a full account of such affairs, but unless these stores are drawn and told we can learn nothing, and will just do it all again

 

 And like plutocrats and aristocrats, theocrats and epistocrats come and go, but on at least three occasions over the last thousand years anti-theocratic, anti-aristocratic,  revolutions have occurred, entirely up-ending prevailing power structures, yet with new societies borne from the carcass of the old.

 

Insofar as anyone learns anything from history, these three revolutions hold lessons for those who currently hold power and for those who think time for another revolution has come.

 

1)   All it took was movable type. Gutenberg thought it would be a good idea if printing plates could be made as re-usable racks holding re-usable letters, allowing such letters to be re-arranged for the printing of each page. Good idea, Johannes! And from this idea there soon emerged a printed Bible, inexpensive enough for wide sale and distribution, and from the distribution of Bibles emerged the revolution named the Reformation. For the people read their new Bibles and realised the teachings of their priests did not exactly match the teachings of the Apostles. Centuries of war and massacre followed, pitting Papist against Protestant, resulting in a Roman Catholic Church surviving but much reduced in power, and ever negotiating and wrestling with their Protestant counterparts.

 

2)   King Charles 1 just pushed his luck too far, such that the principle of “divine right of kings” holding that earthly kings were in place in God’s stead ruling with Divine guidance and approval simply became too far-fetched for even the most ardent Royalist to believe. Off went Charles’ head in 1649, and with it rolled away Royalty’s claims of divine prerogative. Once Louis XVI lost his own head in 1793 the new principle was established beyond doubt: royal privilege persists at the sole pleasure of the people.

 

3)   It is difficult to appreciate today how utterly unquestioning the common people of Europe once were concerning the validity of Christianity as a source of truth. That is, until Darwin got publishing. Prior to Origin of Species, textbooks and works of non-fiction referred to religious teaching and biblical statements with all the unquestioning casualness of a reference to the sea, or the weather, or the existence of horses. But once the ideas of Darwin had soaked in to the popular brain Church teaching was damned to eternally defending itself (whenever it was not being ignored altogether)

 

And it is difficult today to appreciate how all-powerful ecclesiastical authorities once were in Europe, but if the history of these three revolutions carry any lessons it might be these: that the price of power is eternal vigilance, that (ostensible) facts can fall, that history can take unimaginable turns with unimaginable consequences.  

 

Three Anti-Theocratic Revolutions: Lessons in Power, Loss, and the Unpredictability of History

Plutocrats may amass wealth and sway markets. Aristocrats may dominate courts and control land. Theocrats invoke divine sanction to rule souls, while epistocrats claim the authority of knowledge to govern minds. Yet history offers no assurance of permanence to any of them. Power—no matter how inviolable it may seem to its holders—has always been more fragile than it appears. Those who rule on the basis of religious truth or intellectual supremacy have fallen just as precipitously as those who claimed descent from noble blood or dominion over gold.

Among the cycles of upheaval that have defined the last thousand years, three revolutions stand apart—not merely for their scale or violence, but because they represented profound anti-theocratic ruptures. In each case, a society grounded in religious authority or its secularised analogues was upended from within, not merely defeated in battle. The result was not merely regime change, but epistemic transformation: a redefinition of how truth itself was determined, contested, and transmitted.

For those who today enjoy influence—whether clerical, technocratic, or academic—these revolutions are not relics. They are warnings.

 

A further note: in each case, we see the challenged authority re-inventing itself by means of re-inventing its relationship with Truth and re-inventing the version of Truth with which it would thenceforth relate.

 

After the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church had to accept that it would thereafter need to *argue* its case in a doubting world. It did, of course, continue to assert its eternal and unquestionable authority, but with bravado, for its authority was manifestly not eternal and not unquestionable.

 

European Royalty reinvented itself to survive, perhaps surprising even itself at how lucrative, successful and enduring mere theatre would prove. That it is not true Royalty actually royal, as in a breed apart, no longer seems to bother anyone at all.

 

Meanwhile, the broader Church post-Darwin has proven surprisingly resilient as well. No longer an authority to quote in the science and medical textbooks, the Church is  content to propagate a wide if variable range of easily-falsified fictions (depending on the denomination) to a wide if variable range of congregations. By and large, the Church bothers not the sciences, and certainly the sciences bother not with the Church.

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I. The Press and the Pulpit: Gutenberg and the Reformation

Sometimes history turns not on ideology or warfare, but on tools—specifically, tools that change how ideas are copied and circulated. Prior to the mid-15th century, the transmission of knowledge was glacial. Manuscripts were copied by hand, and the cost of owning a book was prohibitive. Knowledge lived in monasteries, behind walls both literal and metaphorical.

Enter Johann Gutenberg.

Gutenberg’s insight was deceptively simple: rather than carving entire pages into woodblocks, as had been done in China centuries earlier, why not create movable metal type—reusable letters that could be rearranged to print any text? In 1454, his 42-line Bible was printed, and with it began not merely a technical revolution, but a spiritual and political one. The Bible, once the preserve of Latin-literate clerics, was now available in the vernacular. Sola scriptura—the idea that the Bible alone should guide Christian belief—emerged not as a theological innovation, but as a technological consequence.

The lay reader could now read, and—more dangerously—compare. What they discovered was disturbing. The rites and rituals of Rome, the indulgences, the cult of saints, the ornate hierarchy—none of it seemed to arise clearly from Scripture. As the German peasants of the early 16th century began to read their Luther-translated Bibles, they discovered a version of Christianity far removed from that taught from their pulpits.

Thus was born the Reformation.

Martin Luther, himself a professor of theology, nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Wittenberg’s Castle Church in 1517, a symbolic act that might have died quietly—except that the printing press turned it viral. By 1520, copies had spread across Europe. The Roman Church responded with excommunication and fire, but it was too late. The dam had broken. Europe would spend the next 130 years in a blood-soaked effort to determine what Christianity now meant—wars that culminated in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which, for the first time, recognised the principle that different rulers might choose different religions for their territories.

It is difficult today to grasp how radical it was for religion to become plural. Prior to the Reformation, there was one Church in the West. Afterward, there could be many. The Catholic Church survived, yes—but permanently humbled, forced to share the stage with a thousand fractal offshoots of Protestant thought. It was no longer the voice of truth, but of a truth—contested, conditional, vulnerable.

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II. Heads and Crowns: The Divine Right of Kings and Its Decapitation

The second revolution came not from a printing press, but from a scaffold.

Throughout the Middle Ages and well into the early modern period, kings did not merely claim political power—they claimed metaphysical legitimacy. To rule as monarch was to be appointed by God. The doctrine of the “divine right of kings” held that monarchs were God’s earthly lieutenants, accountable only to Heaven. Resistance was not merely treason—it was heresy.

But even divine pretensions can wear thin when accompanied by arrogance, taxation, censorship, and war. King Charles I of England pushed his luck. He dissolved Parliament, raised taxes unilaterally, and aligned himself too closely with High Church Anglicanism, which many suspected as crypto-Catholic. When civil war broke out between Royalists and Parliamentarians, it was initially assumed Charles would survive. Monarchs always did.

But in 1649, after years of war, Charles was tried for treason and executed. Not killed in battle. Not assassinated. Tried. Found guilty by men. And beheaded as a man, not as a monarch.

As the axe fell, the doctrine of divine right fell with it.

Cromwell’s Commonwealth followed, and while monarchy was later restored, it returned without its aura of sacrosanctity. When Louis XVI of France followed Charles to the scaffold in 1793, during the French Revolution, the message was unambiguous: sovereignty now derived not from God, but from the general will of the people. Rousseau’s social contract replaced royal bloodlines. “The king must die so that the nation may live,” said Saint-Just, a Jacobin revolutionary.

Today, monarchy survives in many places—but mostly as pageantry. Its claim to divine legitimacy has vanished. And it began vanishing when the idea took root that kings could not only be wrong—but criminally wrong. That they could be judged, tried, and punished by the very people they presumed to rule.

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III. The Death of Certainty: Darwin and the Shaking of the Foundations

The third anti-theocratic revolution did not begin with a guillotine or a printing press, but with a manuscript sent to a publisher in 1859. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was neither blasphemous nor polemical. It was, in tone, almost apologetically cautious. Yet its impact was seismic.

For centuries, Christian theology had been accepted as not merely a moral system, but as a factual account of the universe’s origins and operations. Genesis explained not only creation, but species, time, and man. Even the most secular intellectuals—Hume, Voltaire, Gibbon—wrote within the ambient assumptions of Christianity.

Darwin changed that. His theory of natural selection did not merely propose a different mechanism for the origin of species; it implied that life was not designed, but shaped by blind forces. It suggested that man was not made in God’s image, but descended from animals. And perhaps most devastatingly, it did not need God at all.

As Darwin’s ideas spread, a tectonic shift occurred. Suddenly, biology textbooks no longer cited Genesis as evidence. Theologians found themselves on the defensive, scrambling to reinterpret allegories, to locate metaphor where once they had proclaimed certainty. The Victorian clergyman Charles Kingsley admitted that Darwin’s work had forced him to reconsider “the plenary inspiration of the Pentateuch.”

Within a generation, the Church's epistemic authority was fractured. The world had learned that “truth” might come not from ancient books but from fossil records, geological strata, and statistical models. The scientific method—systematic doubt, empirical verification, falsifiability—became the new arbiter of credibility.

Thus did another form of theocracy wane: the one in which religious truth was synonymous with factual truth. Darwin did not kill God, but he made it possible to ignore Him. And for many, that was enough.

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Coda: Power’s Precarious Foundations

These three revolutions—Reformation, Regicide, and Darwinian Disenchantment—share no single ideology. One exalted Scripture over clericalism. Another replaced monarchs with the people. The third displaced theology with biology. But they all did one thing with devastating efficiency: they tore down entrenched hierarchies of spiritual and intellectual authority.

Each of these moments teaches a variation of the same theme: that no institution, however venerable, is immune to challenge. That no claim to divine or epistemic privilege is eternally secure. As the English essayist Thomas Carlyle once observed, “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” Perhaps. But it is also the autopsy of failed ideas—and the mortuary is full.

To those who presently sit atop our institutions—be they churches, universities, governments, or digital platforms—there is a lesson here: the price of power is not just vigilance against external threat, but internal complacency. For it is not always swords that topple structures. Sometimes it is pamphlets. Or trials. Or fossils.

History does not repeat, but it does echo. And sometimes, what it echoes is revolution.

 

Most often, though, they do not just topple away into oblivion. 

 

The kings and the priests have re-invented themselves, and in doing so they have settled into a kind of role-playing within society in place of the reality-defining they enjoyed prior to their respective “revolutions”.

 

Having lost their former place in the hierarchy of reality, they each settled for what we might see as a good fantasy.  

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