St Peter's Basilica in Rome: completed in 1656, it is one of many monumental buildings completed during the 17th century. Photograph: Reuters
The divisions the Reformation brought to the Church in western and northern Europe in the 16th and early 17th century failed to bring an end to many of the problems the Reformers first hoped to end. Theological differences often gave an excuse for political divisions, giving them an expression that allowed warring factions and those engaged in civil commotion to invoke God's name, and to fight on believing or claiming to have right on their side.
From 1618 to 1648, the Thirty Years War was a continuous series of conflicts between Catholic and Protestant princes, involving France, Sweden and the German states of the declining Empire. The political rivalry between England and France only served to deepen the religious divisions in Scotland.
In England, the suppression of more radical reformers led to the emigration of many Puritans in the early 17th century to new colonies, where the Pilgrim Fathers and others sowed the seeds for change and revolution in North America in later generations. Those Puritans who stayed behind would pave the way for the rise of Cromwell, and, in a distant but direct way, would also pave the way for the rise of parliamentary democracy in Britain.
Cromwell's Commonwealth gave new energy to the more radical post-Reformation movements, including Baptists and Congregationalists, and to new movements such as the Quakers. Had it not been so short-lived, Cromwell's rule might have brought an end to episcopacy in England, destroyed the Anglican Reformation and allowed the rise, growth and multiplication of many more sects, bringing further, deeper divisions within Christianity.
But episcopacy survived in the Church of Ireland, and Irish bishops played a key role in putting the Church of England on a new foundation after the restoration of Charles II. It was an exchange that proved to be mutually beneficial: one of the great English theologians of the period was Jeremy Taylor who came to Ireland as Bishop of Down, Connor and Dromore, while the earliest Anglican hymn writers include the Irish poets Nahum Tate, poet laureate, and Nicholas Brady, chaplain to William and Mary.
But the 17th century also demonstrated a new spirit of intellectual inquiry, characterised in France and the Netherlands by Rene Descartes, who sought proof for the existence of God, and summarised his philosophy in the dictum Cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"), the mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, and by Cornelius Otto Jansen and the Jansenists, condemned posthumously by Pope Innocent X.
The 17th century was also one of monumental building - Saint Peter's was completed in Rome in 1656, Christopher Wren began work on Saint Paul's Cathedral in London in 1675, and the Counter-Reformation found "its ultimate expression" in the Baroque architecture of Italy and Spain, which soon spread to Austria, southern Germany and France.
It was a century of monumental art - Protestantism found its supreme expression in painting, particularly in the Dutch school, exemplified by Rembrandt and his biblical subjects. And it was a century of monumental writing - John Donne had been Dean of Saint Paul's, John Milton's Paradise Lost dates from 1665 and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress was published in 1678. But it was a century of persecution and suppression too. Bunyan had been jailed in Bedford in 1660, the Huguenots lost their religious liberty in France with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and Louis XIV struck out against the Jansenists, destroying their spiritual centre at Port-Royal.
The conflicts and wars in the immediate aftermath of the Reformation appeared to have consumed the energies of the churches, leaving them exhausted by the end of the 17th century, and the church of the 18th century, pilloried in the cartoons of William Hogarth, was in need of revitalisation. But there were signs of renewal and vision throughout Europe.
In England, the first missionary societies were formed through the energies of the Rector of Sheldon, Thomas Bray, who helped found both the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) in 1698 and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG, now USPG) in 1701, whose early missionaries in North America included George Berkeley.
The way was being prepared for a new cultural, intellectual and spiritual awakening throughout the Christian world. In Germany, Philip Jacob Spenner, author of Pia Desideria, gave rise to Lutheran Pietism before his death in 1705. Soon, Johann Sebastian Bach was at work, inscribing the scores of his religious work at the beginning with the letters "JJ" (Jesu juva, Jesus help) at the beginning, and at the end with "SDG" (Soli Deo Gloria, to God alone the glory).
In Ireland and England, Handel was working on his oratorios, including Messiah. The churches were producing philosophers of the calibre of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne and a former SPG missionary, and Joseph Butler, Bishop of Durham. In North America, Jonathan Edwards sparked the revival known as the Great Awakening in 1734. It had subsided four years later, but in England in 1738, John Wesley underwent a remarkable spiritual experience in London. When he died in 1791, Wesley had travelled 225,000 miles on horseback, preached 40,000 sermons, and left 70,000 Methodists in Britain and Ireland, and there were 60,000 more in America.
A spirit of renewal also took a hold on the Orthodox Churches of Eastern Europe. For 300 years, the Ottoman occupation had weakened their inner vitality, and they were under pressure from Islam and the Enlightenment rationalists. But a spiritual revival began on Mount Athos, the monastic peninsula in northern Greece, where Bishop Nicholas Kalliboutzes (Saint Nicodemus) edited the Philokalia and sparked new interest in the Jesus Prayer, the prayer of the heart which spread throughout Europe: "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, the sinner".
But the independence of theological inquiry was under threat in parts of western Europe. The Jesuits were banished from Portugal in 1759, they were expelled from France in 1764, 5,000 were deported from Spain and the Spanish empire in 1767, and the Society of Jesus was suppressed by Pope Clement XIV in 1773. Suppression of the Jansenists and Jesuits in France did not end independent thinking and inquiry, and a Church that had been intellectually disarmed could do little to reply to the criticism of Voltaire and Rousseau, and found itself unprepared for the tide of revolution. In Ireland, fear of the spread of French revolutionary ideas contributed in part to the formation of the Orange Order in 1795 and, in the same year, the foundation with government funds of the College of Saint Patrick at Maynooth.
The SPCK and the SPG, founded by Bray, had at first confined their work to the British colonies. But among the Protestant churches, missionary work was expanding through the formation of the Baptist Missionary Society (1792), the London Missionary Society (1796), and the Church Missionary Society (1799). Christianity, threatened by the wars, revolutions, internal conflicts and philosophical questioning of the 17th and 18th centuries, was about to launch its greatest drive towards expansion and growth, and about to face its greatest intellectual challenges.
Rev Patrick Comerford is a writer on church history and theology and an Irish Times journalist. Contact: theology@ireland.com