Who to Blame for Early Modern Climate Change?

The sky in the northern hemisphere had been darkened, the winters unusually harsh, and the summers barely arriving for decades when the German Lutheran author Johann Arndt published his Four Books on True Christianity in 1610. Arndt warned his readers that:

when the sky burns like this, and the sun turns blood-red, it is telling us: Behold, one day I will perish in fire. In this way, all the elements speak to us, announcing our wickedness and punishments.

Despite being a staggeringly popular work of Lutheran devotionalism, Arndt’s book was unorthodox: there was very little of Luther’s theology, and quite a lot of alchemical philosophy. He borrowed heavily from the work of the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus, often simply excerpting large portions of the latter’s writing without attribution. In doing so, Arndt injected early modern Protestantism with a heavy dose of Hermetic philosophy, a belief that God is actively present within creation itself. A philosophical belief with roots in the Antique Mediterranean world, this perspective was entirely absent from orthodox Lutheranism, in which the cosmos was a fallen world of mere matter and divine knowledge was only accessible in scripture. For his readership, Arndt’s book of alchemical Christian devotion seems to have been a welcome explanation of the worrying changes in their climate.

Environmental historians and climate scientists now recognise the 17th century as a period of intense climate change, the peak of the Little Ice Age – a period of severe cooling between the 16th and late 18th centuries – in which average yearly temperatures in the northern hemisphere plunged by as much as two degrees Celsius. While such a number might seem small, it had massive local effects. The major goal of the 2015 Paris Climate Accords was to ‘hold global temperature increase to well below 2°C’, an acknowledgement that anything beyond this number represents an irretrievable disaster. Historical sources from the coldest period of the Little Ice Age give some insight into a time when a similar climate disaster came close. Historians such as Geoffrey Parker have begun to map out the cultural and historical consequences of the Little Ice Age across the hemisphere, from the Americas to Europe and Asia, most notably crop failure, which led to food shortages and widespread social and military conflict. The global tumult of the 17th century was clearly the result of the climax of a period of catastrophic climate change.

For many, these weather phenomena were fundamentally religious events that called for a godly interpretation. The popular religious writings of 17th-century Europe reveal ordinary people’s experiences of their environment and their attempts to make sense of it. Of these, perhaps no author was more popular (at least among Protestants) than Johann Arndt, whose writings went through hundreds of printings during the century and who was rumoured to have outsold the Bible in some parts of Germany. Arndt’s writings attended directly to the environmental circumstances of the Little Ice Age, offering a religious explanation for the extreme environmental phenomena that orthodox Lutheranism simply did not mention or account for.

One particularly ominous phenomenon was the darkening of the skies across the northern hemisphere. An unusual spate of volcanic activity around the world hurled enough sulphur dioxide into the upper stratosphere to dim the sun for decades, likely further contributing to the already unusually low temperatures. For those dependent on the light and warmth of the sun for their crops, these combined phenomena must have been visually ominous just as they had a brutal effect on agricultural yields.

Arndt put forward the obvious interpretation: ‘When one now looks at the darkness of the sun and the moon, one should think that … it is contrary to their nature, and proclaims to us a great wickedness performed on earth.’ The dimming of the skies and the celestial bodies that reside there, he argued, must have been the result of some human moral failure. This was a conclusion that could not have been reached through orthodox Lutheran doctrine, which held that divine knowledge can only be found in the scriptures and not through environmental phenomena.

Similar interpretations of climate change during the period led to tragic instances of scapegoating. In southern Germany in 1626, a spring hailstorm followed by sudden Arctic temperatures prompted the swift and horrific torture and execution of 900 men and women, accused of creating the storm by witchcraft.

Arndt, for his part, did not attempt to blame vulnerable groups. Instead, he presented an ecological vision in which humans and the cosmos were in intimate interrelation, suffering together even as they did so as a result of human moral failure:

The suffering of the macrocosm, that is, the great world, is subsequently fulfilled in the microcosm, that is, in humanity. What happens to man, nature and the great world suffer first, for the suffering of all creatures, both good and evil, is directed towards man as a centre where all lines of the circle converge. For what man owes, nature must suffer first.

These radical religious writings, and their intense popularity, seem to reveal an early modern reading public intent on interpreting and understanding their changing environment. Arndt’s book permanently transformed Protestant Christianity and its relationship with the physical world by shuttling Hermetic perspectives on the divinity of the cosmos into a Europe that was desperate for a religious understanding of their changing climate. 
 

Timothy Grieve-Carlson is Assistant Professor of Religion at Westminster College, Pennsylvania and the author of American Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse in the Life of Johannes Kelpius (Oxford University Press, 2024)