What if Martin Luther had become Pope?
In 1976, Kingsley Amis answered this question in his fantastical novel The Alteration.
In it, Amis sketches the panorama of a fictional Europe in the twentieth century that has avoided the disintegration of Christianity into Catholicism and Protestantism.
The Reformation did not lead to a schism in the church, but rather promoted Luther himself to the throne of Peter as Pope Germanian I.
This imagined "change" in the course of history has drastic consequences for Amis.
The modern has failed.
In present-day England, castrati still sing, there is no electricity and little else in technology, 'science' is a dirty word, and the greats of Western culture are under the heel of the Church.
The path from Amis' novel to the new book by retired historian Heinz Schilling is shorter than it might seem.
Schilling's great story also revolves around the connection between the Reformation and the European present.
A central characteristic of Christianity, which Schilling identified as early as late antiquity and the Middle Ages, is its bipolar inner structure.
Transcendence and immanence, faith and world, church and state - Christianity legitimizes and serves both poles.
For a long time, therefore, Western Christianity had a dual leadership in the form of pope and emperor.
As often as the two leadership positions competed with one another, even more often they entered into close alliances.
This concerned in particular the fight against groups of dissidents,
However, the successful cooperation in fighting heretics between church and secular power crumbled in the early sixteenth century.
The secular rulers gradually discovered that promoting dissenters against the pope could sometimes be more profitable than fighting them together.
After 1517, many reformers therefore found the support of their authorities, who skilfully used the Reformation to strengthen their emerging state apparatus.
The traditional alliance of spiritual and secular powers was revived, yes, it became more intense than ever, now of course under the sign of a divided Christianity.
This not only strengthened the power of states;
it was only then that the modern large Christian churches came into being, which developed into institutionalized, homogeneous and hierarchical mass organizations in constant exchange with the emerging state power.
The result was a profound change in the understanding of church, faith and religious life.
Two ideologically opposed but structurally very similar camps emerged and eyed each other with extreme hostility.