God and Man in Iceland, Part II
By Tal Howard
We welcome this guest post on Christianity in Iceland from Tal Howard, Professor of History and the Humanities and holder of the Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Chair in Christian Ethics at Valparasio University. Read part 1 here.
Christianization proper began in 999-1000, according to the Book of Icelanders (ca. 1200), a key source of early Icelandic history. At this time Iceland stood under the influence of Norway, whose king Óláfr Tryggvason, a convert, enjoined the new faith over the old Norse gods. The directive divided the Icelandic chieftains. Resolution came at Althing (“parliament”), the annual summer meeting of all chieftains at Thingvellir (which we visited) where matters of common concern were discussed and justice meted out. Remarkably, the chieftains agreed to have the “Lawspeaker,” one Thorgeir of Ljósavatn, consider the matter and make a decision binding on the whole island.
According to the record, Ljósavatn retired to his booth and lay under a hide for a whole day and night to meditate on the knotty question. He then rose and gave a speech in which he said that it would be intolerable for the country to divide over religion and that the new faith should be accepted. But he offered two caveats: the old gods could still be worshipped privately without penalty, and the eating of horseflesh and the exposure of infants (two criticisms made by Christians) should be allowed to continue. With this verdict, conversion took place as a peaceful and almost unique historical event.
Eventually, two bishoprics came into existence: one at Skálholt in the south and Hólar in the north. The first bishops were foreigners. But in 1056, a native Icelander, Ísleifr Gizurr, was consecrated. The ceremony took place in Bremen, then a key ecclesiastical post for all of northern Europe, and performed by Bremen’s Archbishop Adalbert. Reportedly, Iceland’s first native bishop traveled to the Continent with a captured polar bear from Greenland to offer after consecration as a gift to the Holy Roman Emperor. From roughly this time, a handful monasteries began to crop up throughout Iceland’s vast landscape.
Compared to other parts of Europe, Christianity was still young in Iceland when the Reformation erupted. In the 1500s, Iceland stood under the colonial rule of the Kingdom of Denmark, which had embraced the still newer faith emanating from Wittenberg, Saxony. At first the new faith was practiced in Iceland only by traders and merchants, mainly Germans and Danes; the first Lutheran church was built for them in Hafnarfjördur, south of Reykjavik. In 1537, however, Christian III of Denmark issued the so-called Church Ordinance, reasoning that what was good for the motherland was good for the colony, and top-down efforts to Protestantize all of Iceland got underway. In some instances, this went peacefully; more often it encountered resistance—as anything imposed by sheer force by a distant ruler might elicit.
The last hold-out was the northern Bishop of Hólar, Jón Arason, an epic figure in Iceland’s religious history and the last Catholic bishop in all of northern Europe. Allied with two of his sons Ari and Björn (celibacy was not Arason’s strong suite), the three men with a band of armed followers defied the Danish crown until 1550, when they were captured and brought to Skálholt, where the Reformation had found more fertile ground. Fearful of Arason’s popularity and unwilling to wait on official instructions from Copenhagen, the Danes and Protestant Icelanders who had captured the three men decided, without trial, to put them to death. Records indicate that on 7 November 1550 it took one blow of the axe to sever the head of Ari, three to do the same for Björn, and no less than seven to finish off their father—a stiff-necked man in every respect. Our motley group visited the site of the execution in Skáholt, the beauty of which today resides uneasily with memory of the grizzly event
The last bulwark against Lutheranism fell with Arason’s head. Soon thereafter, following the script of events on the Continent, church and monastery lands were expropriated by the crown. Medieval practices such as veneration of saints and relics, masses for the dead, and the sale of indulgences soon fell by the wayside. Printing took off as well—the first press was actually introduced by Arason--and soon Bibles appeared in the vernacular, shaping modern Icelandic, which is closer to Old Norse than any Scandinavian language. And not least, the Lutheran Augsburg Confession (1530) became the confessional benchmark for the entire island with its well-known theological accents: “People are freely justified for Christ’s sake, through faith . . .”
At first an elite phenomenon, Lutheranism spread and took more popular root in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet despite thoroughgoing Lutheranization, Arason himself became something of an Icelandic hero. This happened not so much for his religious proclivities but because during the nineteenth century–when Iceland still chaffed under Danish rule–the renegade bishop seemed an apt symbol for Icelandic national independence. This political movement gained steam in the early twentieth century and was achieved in 1944 when Denmark lay under Nazi control. Shortly after independence, Arason’s image, complete with crook and miter, appeared on one of the first postage stamps.
Today, Lutheranism is a state religion, institutionally located under the Ministry of the Interior. Religious freedom is practiced, but only Lutheranism enjoys a privileged place in Iceland’s Constitution as Article 62 reads: “The Evangelical Lutheran Church shall be the State Church in Iceland and, as such, it shall be supported and protected by the State.” Interestingly, in today’s more secular climate, 72% of Iceland’s population oppose this arrangement and desire separation of church and state, but, according to the same 2015 poll conducted by the Icelandic Ethical Humanist Association, 73.8% of the population remain registered in the national church.
Permit me to draw two lessons from our journey. First, while many in 2017 will celebrate the Reformation as the font of modern liberalism and freedom of conscience, people in the sixteenth century often did not experience it this way. Throughout northern Europe, the Reformation, as the case of bishop Arason attests, was often imposed by royal fiat and resistance was crushed. Or else, absent a powerful sovereign, violence occurred or civil war broke out—e.g., the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre or the English Civil War. Second, unlike in math, many things in history simply do not add up. One would think that a predominantly Lutheran country might vilify its last Catholic bishop. But, again, this is not the case: even as Lutheranism became ensconced in Iceland, the defiant bishop emerged as a national hero. And today, an increasingly secular population still nods to Luther’s faith as well as to the memory of its staunchest resister—even while welcoming the pagan gods from their 1000-year sleep.
Go figure, and get thee to Iceland before Ragnarok.
Thomas Albert Howard is Professor of History and the Humanities and Holder of the Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Chair in Ethics at Valparaiso University. He is author of Remembering the Reformation: An Inquiry into the Meanings of Protestantism (Oxford 2016) and editor (with Mark A. Noll) of Protestantism after 500 Years (Oxford, 2016).