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Peter Marshall
The
Reformation
A Very Short Introduction
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Chapter 1
Reformations
A German event
It starts in a thunderstorm in the summer of 1505. On the road
near Erfurt, in the Germany principality of Saxony, a young law
student is caught in the downpour, and fears for his life amidst the
ferocious strikes of lightning. He prays to St Anne, the mother of
the Virgin Mary, offering a bargain: if she will spare his life, he
will become a monk. A fortnight later, he bangs on the door of
the Erfurt house of the reformed Augustinian friars, one of the
strictest of all the religious orders.
Martin Luther told the story about himself, decades later, and it
may not have happened that way. But everything about the tale is
significant: the intensity of the medieval cult of the saints, the
combined quest for material and spiritual salvation, the setting in
Germany. Asking why the Reformation started in Germany is a bit
like asking why the Communist Revolution started in Russia, or
the telephone was invented in America – it happened there
because it happened there. Some important ‘preconditions’ seem
absent. In contrast to Hussite Bohemia, or Lollard-flecked
England, Germany was pretty much a heresy-free zone in the
decades around 1500, with little formal challenge to the authority
of the Church. What was distinctive was its political structure.
Unlike the emergent national monarchies of France, England, and
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The Reformation
Spain, Germany was politically fragmented – a patchwork of petty
princedoms, ecclesiastical territories, and self-governing cities,
under the nominal suzerainty of the grandly named Holy Roman
Emperor. The office was elective, the emperor chosen by seven
territorial ‘Electors’ (including three archbishops). At the time of
Luther’s entry into the monastery the throne was occupied by the
Habsburg dynasty, in the person of Maximilian I. Imperial
business was conducted at meetings of the Reichstag, or ‘diets’ of
the imperial estates, at which electors, princes, and towns were all
represented, and took the opportunity to formulate their
grievances, often about the need for reform in the Church.
Germans compensated for political weakness with a passionate
cultural and linguistic nationalism. The international scholarly
movement for the revival of ancient learning known as humanism
(not to be confused with modern secular humanism) had a
German limb, which found in the writings of the Roman historian
Tacitus descriptions of a free and vigorous Germanic people,
underlining a contemporary sense of subjugation. The nasty side of
German nationalism was an intense Italo-phobia. The far side of
the Alps was a source of moral and cultural corruption – and, with
one brief exception, all 15th- and 16th-century popes were Italians.
There was a political context for this prejudice; Germany was the
one important part of Western Europe outside Italy itself where
the papal aspiration to direct ‘monarchical’ government of the
Church still had some real purchase. The kings of France, Spain,
and England were dutiful sons of Rome. But in a quiet way they
had been nationalizing the Church in their territories, securing the
right to nominate bishops, for example, and using that power to
reward loyal servants. The vacuum of centralized control in
Germany meant that popes retained greater power to appoint to
ecclesiastical offices, and, via the prince-bishops, to extract
taxation from the populace – always a fertile source of bitterness.
Anticlericalism – an antipathy to the political power of the clergy –
does not equate to rejection of Church teachings. All the evidence
suggests that early 16th-century Germany was a pious and
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orthodox Catholic society. But national and anticlerical
resentments abounded, and they found their voice in Luther.
The Luther affair
Reformations
On 31 October 1517, Luther nailed a long list of points for
disputation – Ninety-Five Theses – to the door of the church near
the castle in the Saxon capital of Wittenberg. It is a moment that
has reverberated in history, the day on which the Protestant
Reformation was born and the Middle Ages suddenly dropped
dead. The reality is more prosaic. Some scholars have denied that
the Theses were ever posted at all. It seems likely that they were,
but this was hardly a world-shattering act. Luther was now a
professor at the recently founded University of Wittenberg, and the
conventional method of initiating academic debate within the
theology faculty was to post theses in advance. Because of its handy
location, the door of the Castle Church served as the university’s
bulletin board, and Luther’s gesture has been seen as no more
dramatic than pinning up a lecture list in a modern college. The
Theses themselves were not particularly revolutionary: they did
not reject the authority of the pope, or call for the founding of a
new church, and they addressed a fairly minor and obscure point of
theology. There was in 1517 no blueprint to reform the Church, no
foreseeable outcome. Political circumstances, combined with
Luther’s stubbornness and eventual willingness to think the
unthinkable, allowed it all to get out of hand.
The original issue was indulgences. These were an outgrowth of the
Church’s teaching on sin and penance. Confession to a priest
guaranteed forgiveness from God, but the legal-minded thinking of
the Middle Ages maintained this still left a ‘debt’ to be paid for sin.
Some of this could be worked off in this life through performance
of penances. The rest would be extracted in purgatory – a place in
the afterlife where the souls of all but the truly wicked and the
excessively saintly would suffer for a while before being admitted,
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The Reformation
1. Lucas Cranach’s 1520 portrait of Martin Luther depicts him as
still very much the Catholic friar
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Reformations
debt-free and purified, into heaven. Indulgences were a certificate
remitting some of the punishment due in purgatory in exchange
for performance of a good work (they were originally developed as
an inducement for people to go on crusade) or giving money to a
good cause. Popes argued that, as heads of the Church on earth,
they could draw on the ‘surplus’ good deeds of the saints to
underwrite indulgences. The system had a coherent underlying
logic, but it was open to abuse, and had been criticized by some
thinkers, especially humanists, long before Luther. The papal
indulgence issued in 1515 looked particularly dodgy from the
viewpoint of moralists and reformers. It was designed to raise
money for a prestige project, the building of the new Renaissance
Basilica of St Peter in Rome. Its sale in Germany was arranged by
one of the worst of the worldly prince-bishops, Albrecht of
Brandenburg, who was to keep a share of the proceeds to pay back
the bankers who had financed his purchase of the archbishopric of
Mainz. Fronting the campaign was a Dominican friar, Johan
Tetzel, who went about his business in an effective but crude and
materialistic way, employing the advertising jingle, ‘as soon as the
coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory to heaven springs’.
Luther was appalled by Tetzel’s methods, and by a popular
response which seemed to show no understanding of the need for
true repentance. There was also no love lost between the
Dominicans and the Augustinians. When Pope Leo X first heard of
the controversy, he dismissed it lightly as ‘a quarrel among friars’.
Luther meanwhile was edging towards a momentous conclusion –
if the Church and pope could or would not reform an evident abuse
like indulgences, then something must be wrong with the entire
structure of authority and theology. For some years Luther had
been nurturing doubts about the elaborate ritual mechanisms for
acquiring ‘merit’ in the eyes of God, and coming to the view that
faith alone was sufficient for salvation. Luther’s ‘radicalization’
came into full view in the course of a 1519 debate staged in Leipzig,
against a clever orthodox opponent, Johan Eck. Earlier, Luther
had conventionally appealed against the pope to the authority of a
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The Reformation
general council. But by comparing Luther to Jan Hus, Eck
manoeuvred him into declaring that the Czech heretic had been
unjustly condemned by the Council of Constance, and that
councils, like popes, could err in matters of faith. This left only the
scripture as an infallible source of religious authority. After
Leipzig, there was no going back. Luther was excommunicated by
Leo X in 1520, and responded, characteristically, by publicly
burning the papal bull of excommunication in Wittenberg. He also
published a series of pamphlets castigating the ‘Babylonian
captivity’ of the Church, rejecting the necessity of obedience to the
Church’s canon law, reducing the number of sacraments from
seven to three, and calling on the emperor and German nobility to
step in and reform the Church.
Why did what is sometimes seen as an authoritarian Church not
crush Luther sooner, before he could do so much damage? The
answer is mired in German and international politics. In January
1519, Emperor Maximilian died. The obvious successor was his
grandson, Charles. But by a succession of happy dynastic accidents,
Charles had inherited, in addition to the ancestral central
European Habsburg lands, the wealthy territories of the
Netherlands and the kingdom of Spain. The imperial title would
cap unprecedented superpower status, and the pope was not alone
in wishing to prevent his getting it. For a time, the seven imperial
electors enjoyed immense leverage. One of them was Luther’s
territorial prince: Elector Frederick ‘the Wise’ of Saxony. Frederick
was thoroughly old-fashioned in religion, but immensely proud of
the university he had founded, and of its new superstar professor.
He thus protected Martin Luther from his enemies. When Charles
(who could pay larger bribes) was duly elected, Luther was
summoned under safe conduct to the imperial diet at Worms. In
front of the dignitaries Luther refused to recant his errors,
proclaiming ‘here I stand, I can do no other’ – a veritable slogan of
individual freedom and modernity. In fact, these words may have
been a later gloss on what Luther actually said, a declaration that
he would not retract anything, for ‘my conscience is captive to
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the Word of God’, a perhaps less appealing motto for moderns.
In the aftermath of Worms, Frederick smuggled Luther away to his
castle at the Wartburg, where, hidden from the world for nearly
a year, he translated the New Testament into powerful and
idiomatic German.
Reformations
In the course of these travails, Luther had become a celebrity, and a
German national hero. Humanists (mistakenly) hailed him as one
of their own, blowing away the barbarous ‘sophistries’ of academic
theology. Town burghers and rural peasants alike saw in him an
icon of resistance to judicial and economic oppression by agents of
the Church. He also became in the early 1520s a runaway
best-selling author, the J. K. Rowling (or perhaps the Richard
Dawkins) of his day. Unlike the writings of Wyclif or Hus, Luther’s
books and pamphlets were printed. The co-incidence of Luther’s
protest and the new technology of the printing press seemed to
later 16th-century Protestants a veritable providence of God. In
fact, printing was not so new. Gutenberg had printed his Latin
bible in Mainz almost thirty years before Luther was born, and a
well-established printing industry existed in many European cities,
with Catholic devotional works the largest category of imprint.
Yet Luther’s explosion into print marked a momentous turning
point in the history of the press, the employment of the printed
book for the transmission of opinions, rather than merely
knowledge or edification. Here again, the fragmented nature of
German society helped. Elsewhere, printing tended to be
concentrated in a few towns and cities (in England, nearly all books
were produced in London). But in Germany, presses were widely
scattered across the empire’s many urban centres, making them
more difficult for central authority to control.
Zwingli and the beginnings of radicalism
The protest against Rome was not just Luther’s affair. He was the
prophet, rather than in any concrete sense the leader of the
movement, and the Reformation involved discrete reformations
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The Reformation
from its earliest stages. Events in the Swiss city of Zürich bear this
out. The moving figure here was the resident preacher at the
principal town church, Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), who by his
own account ‘began to preach the Gospel of Christ in 1516 long
before anyone in our region had ever heard of Luther’. Zwingli
differed from Luther in having a stronger background in
humanism, and a deep acquaintance with the works of Europe’s
leading Christian humanist, and scourge of obscurantism in the
Church, Desiderius Erasmus. This was to be significant for the
different directions taken by Luther’s and Zwingli’s theologies.
On the question of authority, Zwingli developed a similar position
to Luther’s: scripture was the sole basis of truth, and the power of
popes and councils was illusory. Zwingli’s ‘Ninety-Five Theses’
moment came in Lent 1522, when he presided over a meal of
sausages that ostentatiously breached the rules for abstaining
from meat in the run-up to Easter. Christian ‘liberty’ in such
matters was a central plank of Zwingli’s, as of Luther’s, teaching,
and no doubt an important element in its popular appeal. In the
aftermath of the sausage incident, Zürich’s town council backed
Zwingli against the local bishop, and gave him the opportunity to
defend his views in a (rigged) public disputation. In 1524, religious
images were removed from the city churches, and fasting and
clerical celibacy were abolished. In 1525, the Latin mass was
replaced with a vernacular communion service. This was a pattern
of ‘urban reformation’ replicated across much of Germany and
Switzerland in the 1520s, as mini-Luthers and mini-Zwinglis
sprang up to demand reform from the pulpit, and town
magistrates, sensing the popular mood, decided to recognize their
demands. In Switzerland, however, the pace of change tended to be
quicker – the important German cities of Augsburg and
Nuremberg, for example, did not unequivocally opt for
Lutheranism until the early 1530s.
Change was swift in Zürich, but not quick enough for some.
A group around the humanist Konrad Grebel felt that Zwingli was
acting too slowly in getting rid of statues of the saints, and broke
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Reformations
decisively with him in 1523. Their slogan of ‘not waiting for the
magistrate’ put them at odds with all who wanted the
implementation of Reformation to be an orderly and official
business. One result of the assault on tradition, and the exaltation
of the status of scripture, was to encourage people to read the bible
themselves, yet the lessons they drew from it were not always those
approved by the leading preachers. Noticing that the practice of
baptizing infants was nowhere described in scripture, Grebel
began rebaptizing adult members of his group. Zwingli’s successor
in Zürich, Heinrich Bullinger, would later coin the term
‘anabaptists’ (rebaptizers) to describe them, a label freely applied
by both Catholics and Protestants to all on the radical end of the
Reformation spectrum. Luther, meanwhile, was having his own
problems with the people he was soon to start calling schwärmer –
enthusiasts or fanatics. During Luther’s enforced absence in the
Wartburg over 1521–2, his collaborator Andreas von Karlstadt
decided to force the pace of change in Wittenberg, removing
images from the churches and celebrating mass in German. Luther
approved the ends, but not the way of proceeding, and on his
return reversed the changes. Karlstadt became one of Luther’s
bitterest critics, comparing the gradualist approach to allowing a
small child to carry on playing with a sharp knife. Luther accused
Karlstadt of having swallowed the Holy Spirit ‘feathers and all’.
The potability of the Holy Spirit was further signified by the arrival
in Wittenberg of the ‘Zwickau Prophets’, three artisan visionaries
ejected from a Saxon cloth town, claiming direct inspiration
from God and the imminent end of the world. They had been
influenced by the former preacher there, Thomas Müntzer,
another militant who decided early on that Luther was a busted
flush, and that the ‘inner word’ of private revelation trumped the
‘dead letter’ of written scripture.
Popular reformation and the Peasants’ War
Luther had sown the wind; now he would reap the whirlwind. So at
least his Catholic enemies claimed, arguing that departure from
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The Reformation
the time-honoured teachings and traditions of the Universal
Church would lead inevitably to anarchy and rebellion. Events in
the mid-1520s suggested they had a point. Luther was no social
revolutionary. His ‘liberty’ was freedom of the Christian conscience
from the spiritually burdensome rules and rituals of late medieval
Catholicism, not a renegotiation of the political and economic
bonds structuring society. But what is preached and what is heard
are not necessarily the same. Perhaps it is not so much that Luther
was misunderstood, as that various groups in German society
selected from his teachings whatever made sense to them, and
applied it to their existing grievances and ambitions. In some
places, like Lübeck, Lutheranism became the ideology for a
municipal coup d’état, adopted by middle-ranking guildsmen
previously excluded from town government by rich patricians.
Studies of popular printed propaganda for the Reformation –
broadsheets and woodcut prints – suggest that serious attempts to
get across Luther’s more complex theological ideas were usually
sacrificed in favour of broad satirical attacks on the Catholic clergy
and hierarchy, with monks and friars depicted as ravening wolves,
the pope as a ferocious dragon.
For all that the early Reformation is sometimes described as an
‘urban event’, it was in the countryside and among the peasants
(the overwhelming majority of the population) that the teachings
of the reformers were most obviously domesticated to an agenda of
social and economic aspiration. The peasantry had longstanding
grievances against their landlords, both lay nobles and wealthy
monasteries, who for decades had been appropriating common
land and seeking to intensify the burdens of serfdom. There had
been isolated revolts in the later 15th and early 16th centuries, but
in 1524–5 the scale and coordination of rebellion was completely
unprecedented, constituting what has been described as a
‘revolution of the common man’. Beginning in the Black Forest
area of southwestern Germany, the revolt spread to the north and
east, with further large outbreaks in Switzerland and Austria. The
rebels pulled down nobles’ castles and sacked monasteries, doing
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Reformations
so in the name of ‘the Gospel’, and demanding the abolition of
serfdom, since, according to the Twelve Articles adopted by a
combined rebel army, ‘Christ has delivered and redeemed us all . . .
by the shedding of His precious blood’. The relationship between
the Peasants’ War and the Reformation has been much debated. It
was clearest in Thuringia, where the radical preacher Thomas
Müntzer himself led a peasant band, believing he was inaugurating
the Apocalypse and Second Coming of Christ. Marxist historians –
before reunification the revolt was a specialism of East German
scholarship – have seen it as a fundamentally secular episode,
the peasants expressing economic aspirations in religious terms
since they had no other legitimating language available. The sight
of his theology transformed into revolutionary ideology horrified
Luther, who brought no credit on himself by publishing in May
1525 a pamphlet urging princes to slaughter without compunction
the ‘robbing and murdering hordes of peasants’. They needed little
encouragement: the revolt was crushed with great brutality;
Müntzer was tortured and beheaded.
German politics and princely reformation
The Peasants’ War was a turning point for reform, and for
Germany. Before 1525, the Reformation was a gloriously disorderly
popular movement, with aspirations to restructure Christian
society. A staple of early pamphlets was the figure of Karsthans, the
cocky Lutheran peasant, who out-argues the priests and university
dons. After 1525, the Reformation was ‘tamed’, reform became
respectable, and Karsthans disappeared. The dissociation of
Lutheranism from social radicalism opened the door for princes to
adopt what its adherents now called the ‘evangelical’ faith. First to
do so was Albrecht of Hohenzollern, clerical Grand Master of the
Teutonic Knights, a crusading order set up in the 13th century to
campaign against the pagan peoples of the Baltic region. By 1525,
Albrecht had secularized the order’s lands, determined to marry,
and reinvented himself as Duke of Prussia. At around the same
time Philip of Hesse adopted the cause, as did Frederick the Wise’s
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The Reformation
successor as Elector of Saxony, John ‘the Constant’. Princely
conversions remained a trickle in the 1520s, but accelerated in the
following decade when the greater part of north Germany became
officially Lutheran. The powerful Elector of Brandenburg signed
up in 1539, and the Elector of the Palatinate in 1546.
In the meantime, official reformations were starting to take place
outside of Germany and Switzerland, notably in the Scandinavian
kingdoms. After victory in a Danish civil war, Christian III
established a Lutheran state in 1536. The following year he
imposed Lutheranism on Denmark’s vassal kingdom of Norway,
though it took a generation and more for the change to be accepted
by the Norwegian people. The king of Sweden, Gustav Vasa, was
quick off the mark in declaring the Swedish Church independent
from Rome in 1527. Yet he never showed much personal
enthusiasm for Luther’s new theology, and reforms were
introduced into Sweden at a snail’s place, with no final and
emphatic national declaration for the Lutheran faith before 1593.
Events in another peripheral European kingdom, England, were in
some ways similar. Henry VIII had no time for Martin Luther and
the feeling was mutual. For all his deference to properly
constituted authority, Luther was spectacularly rude about Henry,
calling him a ‘damnable and rotten worm’ in response to a propapal book the king wrote in 1521. Luther’s view did not change
much, even after Henry had seen his own version of the light:
‘Squire Harry means to be God, and do as he pleases’, Luther
sighed, as Henry married for the sixth time. Wedlock was the
touch-paper of Henry’s English Reformation. The pope’s refusal to
allow an annulment of his barren marriage to Katherine of Aragon
eventually drove Henry into rebellion, declaring himself ‘Supreme
Head’ of the Church of England in 1534. Henry himself was no
evangelical (though some important advisors, like Archbishop
Thomas Cranmer, certainly were) but he cheerfully employed
‘Word of God’ rhetoric to justify radical steps like dissolving the
monasteries. Kings, as well as peasants, could select what they
fancied from the menu of Reformation ideas.
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Reformations
Within Germany, there was a substantial political obstacle to
further expansion of Reformation: the Holy Roman Emperor,
Charles V. Charles looked upon himself as the chief defender of
Catholic Christendom against its foes. The trouble was, those foes
were coming from all directions. North African piracy haunted the
western Mediterranean, and in the east, the forces of the Turkish
Ottoman Empire seemed in relentless advance, under the brilliant
and charismatic sultan Suleyman ‘the Magnificent’. In the face of
expansionist Islam, compromise at home looked sensible, a view
shared by Catholic German princes who considered stable
government by heretics preferable to the anarchy unleashed by the
Peasants’ War. In 1526, the imperial diet at Speyer issued a
directive that – until a general council of the Church could convene
to settle matters – princely territories and self-governing cities
should be free to regulate religious matters as they pleased. The
Edict of Worms, condemning Luther, his writings, and all who
supported him, was in effect suspended. But intense mistrust
remained on all sides, and in 1529 a second Diet of Speyer
reinstated the Edict of Worms. Six of the princes present, along
with the delegates from fourteen towns, signed a ‘protestation’
against the diet’s decision. Their action created a new proper
noun – ‘Protestant’ – and a new political identity.
Protestants banded together against the fear the empire was about
to strike back. Under the leadership of Philip of Hesse and John of
Saxony, a defensive alliance was concluded in the Thuringian town
of Schmalkalden in 1531. This was a political complement to the
Augsburg Confession of the previous year, an agreed statement of
core Lutheran doctrine, drawn up by Luther’s younger
collaborator, Philip Melanchthon. ‘Protestants’ now shared a
name, but they did not all share a platform. Zwingli and the Swiss
cities did not adopt the Augsburg Confession, having significant
theological reservations, especially over interpretation of the
communion service. Several South German towns signed up to a
separate ‘Confession’ of the Strassburg reformer Martin Bucer,
though most southern towns trickled into the Lutheran orbit
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The Reformation
during the 1530s. In the following decade, German Lutheranism
nearly met a premature end. In 1546, the year of the death of its
founding father, Martin Luther, war broke out between Charles V
and the Schmalkaldic League. Charles’s brilliant victory at
Mühlberg in the spring of 1547 allowed him to dictate terms.
The Augsburg Interim of the following year made a handful of
concessions to Protestant sensibilities – clerical marriage was
allowed, and communion for the laity with both bread and wine.
But otherwise it insisted on traditional doctrine and discipline in
formerly Lutheran states and ‘Reformed’ towns. There was an
exodus of principled refugees, particularly from the German South,
the first of many waves of religious immigration in the
Reformation. Some exiles, like Bucer, finished up in England,
where Henry VIII’s successor, the child-king Edward VI, was the
figure-head of a strongly Protestant regime, which, like Churchill’s
government in 1940, saw itself as standing alone against a
European tyranny.
Pride comes before a fall. The magnitude of Charles’s victory
alarmed the German Catholic princes, who, fearing for their
autonomy, backed away from their military alliance. Several
Protestant states resumed the offensive in 1552, supported by the
French Catholic king, Henry II, who saw an opportunity to make
mischief. Charles was driven back to the negotiating table, though
disillusioned with life, he left the negotiating to his brother
Ferdinand, and shortly afterwards retired to a monastery in Spain.
The mandates of the 1555 Peace of Augsburg are usually summed
up in the Latin tag, cuius regio, eius religio (‘whoever your ruler
is, that’s your religion’). Princes within the empire were free either
to retain Catholicism or adopt the Augsburg Confession. Cities
could profess Lutheranism on condition of allowing Catholic
worship as well. Religious divisions were thus recognized and
institutionalized, and the Reformation was saved in Germany. But
Lutheranism’s hour of crisis had produced deep internal wounds.
Melanchthon’s willingness to submit to the Augsburg Interim, as
well as his apparent sympathy for some aspects of ‘Reformed’
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Protestantism, antagonized self-appointed guardians of Luther’s
legacy. Quarrels between ‘Philipists’ and ‘Gnesio-’ (or orthodox)
Lutherans were finally resolved by the 1577 Formula of Concord,
but by now Martin Luther’s urgent reformism was ossifying into a
rigid doctrinal system, obsessed with theological correctness.
Lutheranism was no longer the beating heart of religious reform,
and, while the Lutherans were squabbling, the Reformation
had undergone a second birth.
Calvin, Geneva, and the Second Reformation
Reformations
The site of that nativity was an unlikely one: the unprepossessing
town of Geneva (population about 10,000), on the western
fringe of the Swiss Confederation. Like numerous other small city
states, Geneva had opted for the Reformation in the early 1530s,
ousting its Catholic bishop with the help of its larger Protestant
neighbour, Bern, and an exiled French preacher, Guillaume
Farel. In 1536, Farel begged for the assistance of another French
religious exile, Jean Calvin, who happened to be passing
through Geneva on his way to Basel. Calvin was a lawyer by
training, who had followed a conventional academic career (no
dramatic thunderstorm episode!) before fleeing France in the
wake of a crackdown on Protestant sympathizers in 1534. Unlike
Luther, who wrote copious if disorderly autobiography, we
know little about Calvin’s early life, or his private character and
habits. But we know plenty about the contents of his mind.
Where Luther was boisterous and inconsistent, Calvin was logical
and methodical. Luther’s theology was a scatter-gun; Calvin’s a
sniper’s rifle.
Today, only specialists remember the titles of Luther’s countless
short works, but the essential features of Calvin’s thought were all
contained in a single volume, The Institutes of the Christian
Religion, which expanded in various French and Latin versions
from an original edition of 1536. The book’s full title advertised to
readers that it contained ‘almost the whole sum of piety and
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The Reformation
2. This 1562 portrait of Calvin at the age of 53 gives few clues about
his character or personality
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whatever it is necessary to know in the doctrine of salvation’. It was
a formidable attempt – using logic, grammar, and rhetoric – to
schematize everything that was knowable about an ultimately
mysterious and transcendent God.
Reformations
Calvin’s campaign to reform Geneva (Farel soon moved on
elsewhere) got off to a rocky start. The city council wanted a
Zürich- or Bernese-style reformation, where the magistrates
retained complete control over the Church. Calvin favoured
cooperation, but insisted on freedom of action, particularly over
the issue of excommunicating unrepentant sinners, a task which
devolved to the Consistory, a body comprising ministers,
magistrates, and lay ‘elders’, with responsibility for discipline and
moral regulation. The campaign against ‘sin’ involved Calvin in
long-running battles with sections of the Genevan social elite, who
disliked being told not to dance at society weddings, or give
traditional family names (and therefore those of Catholic saints) to
their children at baptism. In fact, it took almost two decades for
Calvin (who held no official post beyond that of preacher) to stamp
his authority on the town. His eventual success owed much to the
support of large numbers of refugees who made Geneva their home
in the middle decades of the century, more than doubling the
population. The great majority, like Calvin himself, were from
France. But modern Geneva’s reputation as international centre
par excellence was anticipated in these years. In the mid-1550s, it
gave a home to escapees from the (temporary) Catholic restoration
of Henry VIII’s pious daughter Mary I. One of these, the Scot John
Knox, liked what he saw, considering Geneva ‘the most perfect
school of Christ that ever was in this earth since the days of the
Apostles’. There were other places where Christ was truly
preached, but none for ‘manners and religion to be so sincerely
reformed’. Posterity has been less effusive, inclined to regard
Calvinist Geneva as dour and repressive, a theocratic police state.
Modern scholarship has tried to redress the balance, emphasizing
the Consistory’s role in social welfare and even marriage
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The Reformation
counselling. Nonetheless, 16th-century Geneva was not the
European capital of fun.
It was, however, the epicentre of a political and doctrinal
earthquake, sending the seismic waves of a ‘Second Reformation’
right across the European continent. Only to a limited extent did
Calvin plan and direct this movement, but he was its patron and
godfather. Calvin’s most direct influence was on Geneva’s huge
neighbour to the west, and in the organization and attitudes of the
French Protestants who became known, for reasons no one has
been able to explain satisfactorily, as Huguenots. French émigré
pastors were trained in Geneva and sent back into their homeland;
the Genevan presses churned out Protestant books for the French
market. Calvin wrote letters of advice on the establishment of
consistories, and stern warnings about avoiding contamination
from Catholic worship. Huguenot numbers grew rapidly in the
middle of the 16th century, especially in the towns, with a
concentration of numbers in the south and west; they peaked at
somewhere between 10% and 20% of the French population.
A minority group, blatantly defying the wishes of the French
crown, required a militant and self-righteous ideology, and a tight
organizing structure: Calvinism supplied both. Local
congregations sent representatives to provincial synods, and a
‘national synod’ convened in Paris in 1559. But what really gave
French Protestantism the potential to destabilize the nation was
committed aristocratic support, with all that implied for political
leadership and military muscle. Backed by the noble houses of
Bourbon, Condé, and Coligny, French Protestants ambitiously
imagined they could convert a kingdom. Political instability was
compounded by the premature death of Henry II, and attempts by
the fervently Catholic Guise family to dominate the regency of
Francis II. The result was civil war, or rather, a generation’s worth
of civil wars which ran in fits and starts from 1562 to almost the
end of the century. Earlier scholarship emphasized politics in all
of this, but recent studies tend to think the ‘French Wars of
Religion’ were aptly named. They became particularly intense
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when, due to the failure of all Henry II’s sons to reproduce, the
Protestant Henry of Bourbon became first heir (1584) and then
inheritor (1589) of the kingdom as Henry IV. But France, eldest
daughter of the Church, was not ready for a Protestant king. We
can add ‘Paris is worth a mass’ to the list of things famous people
are supposed to have said, but didn’t. Nonetheless, Henry realized
his conversion was the price of political stability. France was the
greatest ‘might-have-been’ of the Reformation era, but after
Henry’s reconciliation with Rome in 1593, French Protestantism
began a slow decline. It was too significant a movement to repress
outright, however, and Henry’s 1598 Edict of Nantes granted
limited rights of worship to Huguenots, institutionalizing the
religious divide.
Reformations
Calvinism played its part in another armed struggle of the later
16th century: that of the Low Countries against Spanish
overlordship. The earliest religious dissent in the Netherlands was
Lutheran, and ruthlessly suppressed by the government of
Charles V. Luther’s own opposition to illegal underground
congregations, or conventicles, probably didn’t help, and over time
Calvinist influence increased. The constitutional conflict was not
at first obviously religious in complexion. When Charles V
abdicated, he divided his dominions: the ancestral lands went
(with the imperial title) to his brother, Ferdinand; Spain and the
Netherlands to his son, Philip. Whereas Charles (a native of Ghent)
understood the Netherlands, with their complex jigsaw of
jurisdictions and traditions of local autonomy, the Spanish Philip
did not, and began a policy of centralization. The result was open
revolt (1566), and an almost universal revulsion, on the part of
Catholics as well as Protestants, against the brutal methods of the
Duke of Alva’s Spanish army sent to repress it. Increasingly,
however, Calvinism could paint itself as the creed of patriotic
resistance, particularly after it was adopted by the military and
political leader of the revolt, William of Orange. Eventually, the
Netherlands divided along a religious fault-line. The north
espoused Protestantism; the southern ‘Spanish Netherlands’
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The Reformation
became a bastion of Catholicism, later acquiring the name
‘Belgium’. There was a curious development in the independent
Dutch Republic, however. Calvinism was recognized as the ‘public’
religion, but never fully became a state church. Ministers had
grown used to controlling members of voluntary congregations
through the institution of the consistory, and were unwilling to
give this up. The result was that while anyone might attend church
and hear sermons, actual members of the Calvinist Church,
receiving communion, and placing themselves under the authority
of the consistory, remained a minority – only about 10% of the
population of Holland as late as the end of the 16th century.
Calvinism was a protean beast. It shaped the Reformation in all
parts of the British Isles, but produced different shapes in each of
them. John Knox returned to Scotland from his Genevan idyll in
1559, and launched a revolution against the pro-French Catholic
queen, Mary Stewart, who eventually (1568) fled south to England,
leaving her son James to be brought up a godly Calvinist prince.
The Scottish Kirk wore its Calvinist heart on its sleeve, setting up a
full ‘presbyterian’ system with consistories (called here kirk
sessions), synods, and a General Assembly. In England, by
contrast, the later 16th-century Church was a theological hybrid.
Its doctrine was more or less solidly Calvinist, but its governing
structures were hand-me-downs from the medieval Catholic
Church, involving bishops, cathedrals, and diocesan church courts.
This had much to do with a historical and doctrinal oddity of the
English scene, the ‘royal supremacy’ established by Henry VIII.
Governing the Church though a score of bishops was much easier
for the crown than dealing with gaggles of independent-minded
ministers in an assembly. The ossification of English Church
structures also owed a lot to the conservative outlook of Elizabeth I,
who succeeded her Catholic half-sister Mary in 1558. Having
restored Protestant worship, ditched the pope, and re-dissolved
the monasteries, Elizabeth determined that nothing else should
really change over the course of her 45-year reign, despite the
urgings of ‘Puritans’ who wanted the Church of England more
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closely to resemble the ‘best reformed’ European churches (i.e.
Zürich and Geneva). In Ireland, Protestant Reformation went
hand-in-hand with English colonialism, and foundered largely for
that reason. In the Tudor period, Irish Protestantism was largely
confined to ‘New English’ settlers, as opposed to the ‘Old English’,
descendants of the 12th-century Anglo-Norman invaders, who,
like the Gaelic population, remained stubbornly impervious to the
blandishments of the Protestant Gospel. Irish Protestantism
developed a strongly Calvinist tinge, suited to the mindset of a
group which remained a beleaguered minority even after
reinforcement by the ‘plantation’ of Scots Presbyterians into Ulster
in the early years of the 17th century.
Reformations
The religious and ethnic complexity of Ireland was mirrored on the
other side of the continent. Eastern Europe was a patchwork of
peoples, in which Calvinists jostled with Catholics, Lutherans,
Jews, Orthodox Christians, and (in Ottoman-controlled areas of
the southeast) Muslims. Calvinism made some progress among the
nobility of Bohemia, though here it had to reach accommodations
with the still-powerful native reformism of the Hussites. The
Reformation also put down multiple roots in the huge multi-ethnic
state created in 1569 by union of the kingdom of Poland with the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania. This was the opposite of a strongly
centralized state, with an elective monarchy and a powerful
noble-dominated parliament, the Sejm. In 1562, King Sigismund II
exempted landowners from the verdicts of the church courts,
effectively allowing them to patronize whatever form of religion
they chose. This benefited not only Calvinists, but radical
‘Unitarians’ who denied the doctrine of the Trinity, and for whom
Poland now became a haven. It was, however, in the ‘three
Hungaries’ that Calvinism fared best. The nation was divided by
1541 into a northwestern Habsburg kingdom, a Christian
principality of Transylvania (a tributary state of the Ottoman
Sultan), and a southern region ruled directly by the Turks. The
Ottoman advance greatly assisted Protestantism by destroying the
control structures of the Catholic Church: half of Hungary’s
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The Reformation
bishops were slain at the disastrous battle of Mohács in 1526.
Uniquely, Transylvania recognized four accepted state religions:
Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, and Unitarian. A pattern
throughout the East, however, was that Lutheranism tended to
appeal only in pockets of German-speaking communities, while
Calvinism had greater saleability among the Poles and Hungarians
for whom Germans were historic oppressors.
Calvinism made significant inroads into Lutheran Germany itself,
where the Peace of Augsburg had recognized only one alternative
to Catholicism. This was a genuine ‘Second Reformation’, getting
underway in 1563 when Elector Frederick III of the Palatinate
announced a switch of allegiance for his Lutheran state.
Frederick’s capital, Heidelberg, site of an important university,
became the leading centre of German Calvinism, and the
Heidelberg Catechism drafted by two of its professors was used
widely throughout the Calvinist world. A number of other petty
princes followed suit over the following half century, not always
carrying their subjects with them. As elsewhere in Europe, a selling
point of the Calvinist system was its malleability. German princely
Calvinism had a politically authoritarian style – no synods or
general assemblies here. Relations in Germany between Lutherans
and Calvinists remained tense at best. But it was Calvinism that
stood to the fore in the era’s greatest ideological conflict,
confrontation with the forces of resurgent Catholicism.
Catholic responses
The revival of the Catholic Church’s fortunes is a remarkable, even
a surprising story. In around 1560 it seemed the Protestant
juggernaut was virtually unstoppable. A northern arc of
kingdoms – Sweden, Denmark, Scotland, England – were all lost,
and heresy was spreading like wildfire in the previously pious
Catholic towns of France and the Netherlands. Across swathes of
Eastern Europe, Catholicism was becoming a minority religion,
and the Habsburg monarchy appeared unable to preserve the faith
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in its own backyard: most of the Austrian nobility became
Protestant in the third quarter of the century. Germany was a
disaster zone, its population perhaps 80% Protestant; the sole
remaining Catholic state of any importance was the Duchy of
Bavaria. Only in Catholicism’s Mediterranean heartlands –
Portugal, Spain, and Italy – had the authorities managed to snuff
out the flame of Protestantism almost before it had caught light.
Reformations
If we fast-forward 60 years, the picture looks very different. The
Huguenots were defeated and diminishing in France; the southern
Netherlands were recovered and re-Catholicized; most of south
Germany was back in Catholic hands; and a vibrant Catholic
revival was sweeping through Austria, Poland, and Hungary.
Protestantism had its back to the wall, and knew it. How had this
come about? A cynical answer has something to commend it:
military force. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the pope
really did have a lot of divisions. Ultimately, the Huguenots were
the losing side in a civil war, and the recovery of the southern
Netherlands was due principally to the brilliant victories in the
1590s of the Spanish general, the duke of Parma. The Habsburgs
too began to apply military logic to the religious problems of
their territories, after the reigns of some pretty diffident emperors
in the second half of the 16th century. But force is by no means
the whole story. Catholicism remade itself in the course of its own
reformation, drawing on its historic strengths but also exposing
itself to the shock of the new. The process began in earnest at the
Council of Trent (1545–63).
To reformers of all stripes, a general council had long seemed the
solution to the Church’s ills. But powerful vested interests had
kicked it into the long grass. The French king, Francis I, was
obstructionist, aware that his rival Charles V would benefit if a
council healed the schism in Germany. The popes themselves
feared a revival of the conciliar movement, and a draining away of
their authority. The result was that by the time a council actually
convened, in the northern Italian town of Trent, religious divisions
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The Reformation
3. A 16th-century engraving of the Council of Trent in session: its
decisions would set the tone for Catholicism for centuries to come
had run too deep, and the reconciliation with the Lutherans that
Charles V hoped for was never really on the agenda. In fact, the
Council’s early sessions (1545–7) were largely concerned with
formulating definitions of Catholic doctrine (for example, on the
complementary status of scripture and tradition) in a way that
clearly distinguished them from Protestant views. The later
sessions (1551–2, 1562–3) tackled institutional reform, ordering
bishops to reside in their dioceses as pastors to their flocks, rather
than swan around as leisured aristocrats or government officials.
Perhaps the most crucial reform was the order for all dioceses to set
up seminaries for the training of clergy, a distinctly haphazard
process in the Middle Ages. The aspiration for a disciplined and
educated priesthood was a cornerstone of Catholic reform.
Trent inaugurated a new way of being Catholic, expressed in the
Latinized adjective ‘Tridentine’. When the Council wrapped up,
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Reformations
the process of Catholic reform still had a long way to go, but the
achievements were undeniable. The clarification of Catholic
doctrine on virtually all contested issues created a unified template
of belief for a single Roman Catholic Church, superseding the
woollier ‘Catholicisms’ which had co-existed in pre-Reformation
Europe. Trent authorized a standardized catechism (religious
instruction book) for the laity, and imposed a uniform order on the
celebration of the mass – the Tridentine rite still beloved of
Catholic traditionalists. In seeking to eliminate ‘abuses’, the
Council directed the energies of priests and bishops firmly towards
the pastoral mission of the Church. Trent also had the opposite
result from 15th-century councils, serving to augment rather than
diminish the authority of the papacy. Successive popes closely
monitored the proceedings, and when Pius IV (1559–65)
confirmed the decrees, he reserved to himself their interpretation.
Papal authority was enhanced morally as well as institutionally in
the aftermath of Trent. There was no going back to the louche
atmosphere of Renaissance Rome, exemplified by the disgraceful
Borgia pope, Alexander VI. Late 16th-century successors like Pius V
(1566–72), Gregory XIII (1572–85), and Sixtus V (1585–90)
did much to restore the honour of the papacy through high
standards of personal austerity.
In parallel with the Council’s deliberations, popes overhauled the
central management of the Church. The Congregation of the Holy
Office (a papally controlled inquisition) was established in 1542,
and a papal ‘Index’ of forbidden books in 1559, with a
Congregation of the Index in 1587 – these are the most notorious
examples of ‘Counter-Reformation’. ‘Congregations’ in this sense
were committees of cardinals tasked with specified administrative
duties. The papacy remained Europe’s pre-eminent example of an
elective monarchy, but the cardinal-electors (whose number was
fixed at 70 by Sixtus V) were taking on the character of an official
bureaucracy reporting to the pope, and began less to resemble a
class of feuding aristocrats.
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The Reformation
One of the Tridentine congregations (established 1622) was that
for the propagation of the faith, Propaganda fide. The fact that it
has given its name to a modern term for political deceit and
manipulation is an indication of the cultural prejudices sometimes
embedded in etymology. Propaganda was a belated official
recognition that the Roman Church was no longer a purely
European Church. In the wake of Portuguese traders and Spanish
conquerors (and frequently in advance of them) Catholicism had
become a world religion, the first truly global faith, with adherents
in every continent bar Antarctica and the still undiscovered
Australia. The evangelization of the wider world was not a direct
riposte to the Protestant Reformation. The first missionaries in
Mexico were humanist-leaning Franciscan friars who knew little or
nothing of Martin Luther. But it soon seemed evident that the
harvest of souls in new worlds compensated for their loss in the
old. One missionary priest wrote excitedly about Japan in the later
16th century that God ‘in the place of so many thousand souls in
Upper and Lower Germany who were tempted by the Evil Enemy
[the devil] . . . has elected another holy people from the other side
of the world, who has hitherto known nothing of the holy faith.’
In so far as the missionary endeavour beyond Europe was part of
the competition between Protestantism and Tridentine
Catholicism to assert the identity of a universal and apostle-like
Church, the latter had shot dramatically ahead on points.
At the forefront of the Catholic missions were the religious orders,
the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians who had long
been the itinerant face of evangelism in Europe. The spiritual
fervour of Catholic reformation spawned numerous new religious
orders, but none were as significant, at home or overseas, as the
Society of Jesus – the Jesuits – founded by the Basque nobleman
Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556) in 1534, and ratified by the pope in
1540. Within little more than half a century, Ignatius’s handful of
ragged companions had mushroomed into an international
organization of some 13,000 members. The Jesuits’ success was
matched only by the deep distrust they aroused, in Catholic as well
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Reformations
as Protestant circles – ‘Jesuitical’ has its cognates in many
European languages. Myths about the Jesuits abound: they were
not founded to serve as anti-Protestant shock-troops, and they did
not take a special vow of ‘loyalty’ to the pope (rather, a pledge to go
on mission anywhere in the world at the pope’s command). Their
original vocation, and for long their forte, was education. Jesuit
schools offered a free education to the poor, and places were also
much in demand from social elites (including some Protestants).
But the Jesuits were soon drawn into the vanguard of the
campaign to recover space and souls from the Reformation – they
were active as preachers and confessors across Germany and
Poland, and as missionaries (occasionally plotters) in Sweden and
the British Isles. The unique Jesuit ‘ethos’ came from a marriage
between traditional monastic structures and flexible activism
(members were not bound to recite the ‘hours’ together in
common). It also reflected the influence of a remarkable book,
Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises – a ‘how-to’ manual of interiorized
and imaginative prayer, which created the modern concept of the
‘retreat’. The Jesuits’ instinct was to reform society from the top
down, and they were drawn to the orbit of social elites. The devout
Habsburg emperor Ferdinand II (r. 1619–37) had a Jesuit
confessor, Guillaume Lamormaini, who stiffened Ferdinand’s
mood of increasing militancy towards his Protestant subjects.
The Thirty Years War and after
The numerous regional confrontations between Reformation and
Counter-Reformation were after 1618 subsumed into a general and
bloody conflagration, pitting the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs,
and a Catholic League headed by Duke Maximilian of Bavaria,
against the Protestant states of Germany, the Netherlands, and
Scandinavia (James I’s England, to the dismay of Puritans, held
aloof ). The Thirty Years War began as a war of religion, though it
didn’t end that way. The initial flash-point was that old cockpit of
religious contention, Bohemia, and the attempt of Bohemian
rebels to replace the then Archduke Ferdinand as their overlord
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The Reformation
with the Calvinist Elector Frederick of the Palatinate. Frederick’s
catastrophic defeat in 1620 at the battle of the White Mountain
overturned two centuries of Bohemian religious experiment: the
Hussite Church was eliminated, and its pastors, along with newer
Protestant associates, were expelled. Shortly afterwards, Catholic
League forces sacked Heidelberg. A string of German victories
through the 1620s encouraged Ferdinand to impose a radical and
arbitrary settlement. His Edict of Restitution (1629) demanded the
return of all Church lands and bishoprics secularized in Germany
since 1552; it also reasserted an almost complete prohibition on
Calvinism in the Empire.
The Edict was a step too far: it alienated moderate allies, pushed
Calvinists and Lutherans into cooperating with one another, and
provoked an extraordinary military intervention. The king of
Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, invaded Germany wearing the
mantle of a Protestant saviour. His stunning victory at Breitenfeld
in 1631 reversed the course of the war, and though Gustavus was
killed in battle the following year, military equilibrium in Germany
was stabilized, and Ferdinand began to explore avenues of
compromise. Meanwhile, fearful of Habsburg hegemony in
Europe, the wily Cardinal-Minister Richelieu brought Catholic
France into the war on the ‘Protestant’ side. The studied neutrality
of the anti-Spanish Pope Urban VIII also made it more difficult to
see the war in its last stage as primarily one of religion.
The Reformation in Germany fought itself to a standstill, and a
series of agreements known collectively as the Treaty of Westphalia
(1648) ended the conflict, though France and Spain would fight
each other till 1659. In a triumph of pragmatism over principle,
Westphalia stabilized the confessional map by accepting the
religious status quo ante (1624 was picked as point of reference, to
annul the Edict of Restitution). The independence of Protestant
Holland was formally recognized, as was the Habsburg coup de
main in the east. Within the empire, Calvinism was at last given
full legal recognition, and, in a striking innovation, Lutheran
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subjects in Catholic territories, and Catholics in Lutheran lands,
were granted the right to worship quietly at home ‘without
investigation or disturbance’.
Reformations
While the Thirty Years War was entering its last phases, the British
decided to indulge in their own round of private religious warfare.
The differences between the state churches of England and
Scotland were magnified after Charles I ascended to the throne of
both kingdoms, and prescribed a more ceremonialist, ‘high’ style of
Protestant worship for the Church of England. The attempt to
extend it to the Scottish Kirk provoked rebellion, and the signing of
a National Covenant (1638) to protect the principles of the
Reformation. In 1641, Catholic rebels in Ireland turned with
marked ferocity on perceived oppressors in their midst, and news
of massacres encouraged paranoid fears in England that Charles
was being secretly manipulated by a cabal of Catholic advisors. The
English Civil War that erupted in 1642 pitted constitutionalism
against unfettered monarchical power, but it had a strongly
religious flavour. The defeat and subsequent execution of Charles
(1649) allowed Puritans to implement their long frustrated plans
for full ‘godly’ reformation, and also unleashed a wave of popular
religious creativity in the form of new radical sects – of these, the
Baptists and Quakers would survive the longest. The restoration of
Charles II in 1660 restored a kind of political stability but it could
not recork the shaken bottle of religious unity. ‘Non-conformists’
were now permanently separated from the Church of England,
whose adherents were beginning to describe themselves as
‘Anglicans’ – a rather different sort of Protestant from established
continental varieties.
It is usually asserted that in the second half of the 17th century the
role played by faith commitments in international and domestic
politics was on the wane, and that the era of religious wars, the era
of Reformation itself, was over. This is true up to a point: the
political colossus of the age was Louis XIV of France (r. 1656–
1715), and the coalitions ranged against his expansionist ambitions
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The Reformation
4. An allegory of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes: Louis XIV
oversees Truth unmasking Heresy while (in the roundels) Calvinists
abjure their faith and Catholics destroy a Protestant chapel
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brought the former standard-bearer of conviction politics –
Catholic Austria – into alliance with Protestant states.
But Louis was at the time firmly identified with the Catholic cause,
both by the local Catholic minority who welcomed his invasions of
the Netherlands, and by the now fervently anti-Catholic English,
who in 1688 deposed their own king, James II, for adherence to
popery. Three years before that, Louis had given an astonishing
demonstration of the convergence of political absolutism and
religious triumphalism, revoking the Edict of Nantes which for
almost a century had allowed Huguenots the right to worship in
France.
Reformations
The outcome was repression and rebellion, a wave of expulsions
and insincere conversions, and a movement of exiles across borders
to nurse bitterness and stoke the fears of their hosts. For a century
and a half, reformations had been the chief motor of European
political and cultural life. They had not quite exhausted that
function, as the age of Enlightenment dawned.
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MARTIN LUTHER
95 THESES
DISPUTATION OF DOCTOR MARTIN LUTHER
ON THE POWER AND EFFICACY OF
INDULGENCES
OCTOBER 31, 1517
Out of love for the truth and the desire to bring it to light,
the following propositions will be discussed at Wittenberg,
under the presidency of the Reverend Father Martin Luther,
Master of Arts and of Sacred Theology, and Lecturer in
Ordinary on the same at that place. Wherefore he requests that
those who are unable to be present and debate orally with us,
may do so by letter.
In the Name our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
1. Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said Poenitentiam
agite, willed that the whole life of believers should be
repentance.
2. This word cannot be understood to mean sacramental penance,
i.e., confession and satisfaction, which is administered by
the priests.
3. Yet it means not inward repentance only; nay, there is no
inward repentance which does not outwardly work divers
mortifications of the flesh.
4. The penalty [of sin], therefore, continues so long as
hatred of self continues; for this is the true inward
repentance, and continues until our entrance into the kingdom
of heaven.
5. The pope does not intend to remit, and cannot remit any
penalties other than those which he has imposed either by his
own authority or by that of the Canons.
6. The pope cannot remit any guilt, except by declaring that
it has been remitted by God and by assenting to God's
remission; though, to be sure, he may grant remission in cases
reserved to his judgment. If his right to grant remission in
such cases were despised, the guilt would remain entirely
unforgiven.
7. God remits guilt to no one whom He does not, at the same
time, humble in all things and bring into subjection to His
vicar, the priest.
8. The penitential canons are imposed only on the living, and,
according to them, nothing should be imposed on the dying.
9. Therefore the Holy Spirit in the pope is kind to us,
because in his decrees he always makes exception of the
article of death and of necessity.
10. Ignorant and wicked are the doings of those priests who,
in the case of the dying, reserve canonical penances for
purgatory.
11. This changing of the canonical penalty to the penalty of
purgatory is quite evidently one of the tares that were sown
while the bishops slept.
12. In former times the canonical penalties were imposed not
after, but before absolution, as tests of true contrition.
13. The dying are freed by death from all penalties; they are
already dead to canonical rules, and have a right to be
released from them.
14. The imperfect health [of soul], that is to say, the
imperfect love, of the dying brings with it, of necessity,
great fear; and the smaller the love, the greater is the fear.
15. This fear and horror is sufficient of itself alone (to say
nothing of other things) to constitute the penalty of
purgatory, since it is very near to the horror of despair.
16. Hell, purgatory, and heaven seem to differ as do despair,
almost-despair, and the assurance of safety.
17. With souls in purgatory it seems necessary that horror
should grow less and love increase.
18. It seems unproved, either by reason or Scripture, that
they are outside the state of merit, that is to say, of
increasing love.
19. Again, it seems unproved that they, or at least that all
of them, are certain or assured of their own blessedness,
though we may be quite certain of it.
20. Therefore by "full remission of all penalties" the pope
means not actually "of all," but only of those imposed by
himself.
21. Therefore those preachers of indulgences are in error, who
say that by the pope's indulgences a man is freed from every
penalty, and saved;
22. Whereas he remits to souls in purgatory no penalty which,
according to the canons, they would have had to pay in this
life.
23. If it is at all possible to grant to any one the remission
of all penalties whatsoever, it is certain that this remission
can be granted only to the most perfect, that is, to the very
fewest.
24. It must needs be, therefore, that the greater part of the
people are deceived by that indiscriminate and highsounding
promise of release from penalty.
25. The power which the pope has, in a general way, over
purgatory, is just like the power which any bishop or curate
has, in a special way, within his own diocese or parish.
26. The pope does well when he grants remission to souls [in
purgatory], not by the power of the keys (which he does not
possess), but by way of intercession.
27. They preach man who say that so soon as the penny jingles
into the money-box, the soul flies out [of purgatory].
28. It is certain that when the penny jingles into the
money-box, gain and avarice can be increased, but the result
of the intercession of the Church is in the power of God
alone.
29. Who knows whether all the souls in purgatory wish to be
bought out of it, as in the legend of Sts. Severinus and
Paschal.
30. No one is sure that his own contrition is sincere; much
less that he has attained full remission.
31. Rare as is the man that is truly penitent, so rare is also
the man who truly buys indulgences, i.e., such men are most
rare.
32. They will be condemned eternally, together with their
teachers, who believe themselves sure of their salvation
because they have letters of pardon.
33. Men must be on their guard against those who say that the
pope's pardons are that inestimable gift of God by which man
is reconciled to Him;
34. For these "graces of pardon" concern only the penalties of
sacramental satisfaction, and these are appointed by man.
35. They preach no Christian doctrine who teach that
contrition is not necessary in those who intend to buy souls
out of purgatory or to buy confessionalia.
36. Every truly repentant Christian has a right to full
remission of penalty and guilt, even without letters of
pardon.
37. Every true Christian, whether living or dead, has part in
all the blessings of Christ and the Church; and this is
granted him by God, even without letters of pardon.
38. Nevertheless, the remission and participation [in the
blessings of the Church] which are granted by the pope are in
no way to be despised, for they are, as I have said, the
declaration of divine remission.
39. It is most difficult, even for the very keenest
theologians, at one and the same time to commend to the people
the abundance of pardons and [the need of] true contrition.
40. True contrition seeks and loves penalties, but liberal
pardons only relax penalties and cause them to be hated, or at
least, furnish an occasion [for hating them].
41. Apostolic pardons are to be preached with caution, lest
the people may falsely think them preferable to other good
works of love.
42. Christians are to be taught that the pope does not intend
the buying of pardons to be compared in any way to works of
mercy.
43. Christians are to be taught that he who gives to the poor
or lends to the needy does a better work than buying pardons;
44. Because love grows by works of love, and man becomes
better; but by pardons man does not grow better, only more
free from penalty.
45. Christians are to be taught that he who sees a man in
need, and passes him by, and gives [his money] for pardons,
purchases not the indulgences of the pope, but the indignation
of God.
46. Christians are to be taught that unless they have more
than they need, they are bound to keep back what is necessary
for their own families, and by no means to squander it on
pardons.
47. Christians are to be taught that the buying of pardons is
a matter of free will, and not of commandment.
48. Christians are to be taught that the pope, in granting
pardons, needs, and therefore desires, their devout prayer for
him more than the money they bring.
49. Christians are to be taught that the pope's pardons are
useful, if they do not put their trust in them; but altogether
harmful, if through them they lose their fear of God.
50. Christians are to be taught that if the pope knew the
exactions of the pardon-preachers, he would rather that St.
Peter's church should go to ashes, than that it should be
built up with the skin, flesh and bones of his sheep.
51. Christians are to be taught that it would be the pope's
wish, as it is his duty, to give of his own money to very many
of those from whom certain hawkers of pardons cajole money,
even though the church of St. Peter might have to be sold.
52. The assurance of salvation by letters of pardon is vain,
even though the commissary, nay, even though the pope himself,
were to stake his soul upon it.
53. They are enemies of Christ and of the pope, who bid the
Word of God be altogether silent in some Churches, in order
that pardons may be preached in others.
54. Injury is done the Word of God when, in the same sermon,
an equal or a longer time is spent on pardons than on this
Word.
55. It must be the intention of the pope that if pardons,
which are a very small thing, are celebrated with one bell,
with single processions and ceremonies, then the Gospel, which
is the very greatest thing, should be preached with a hundred
bells, a hundred processions, a hundred ceremonies.
56. The "treasures of the Church," out of which the pope.
grants indulgences, are not sufficiently named or known among
the people of Christ.
57. That they are not temporal treasures is certainly evident,
for many of the vendors do not pour out such treasures so
easily, but only gather them.
58. Nor are they the merits of Christ and the Saints, for even
without the pope, these always work grace for the inner man,
and the cross, death, and hell for the outward man.
59. St. Lawrence said that the treasures of the Church were
the Church's poor, but he spoke according to the usage of the
word in his own time.
60. Without rashness we say that the keys of the Church, given
by Christ's merit, are that treasure;
61. For it is clear that for the remission of penalties and of
reserved cases, the power of the pope is of itself sufficient.
62. The true treasure of the Church is the Most Holy Gospel of
the glory and the grace of God.
63. But this treasure is naturally most odious, for it makes
the first to be last.
64. On the other hand, the treasure of indulgences is
naturally most acceptable, for it makes the last to be first.
65. Therefore the treasures of the Gospel are nets with which
they formerly were wont to fish for men of riches.
66. The treasures of the indulgences are nets with which they
now fish for the riches of men.
67. The indulgences which the preachers cry as the "greatest
graces" are known to be truly such, in so far as they promote
gain.
68. Yet they are in truth the very smallest graces compared
with the grace of God and the piety of the Cross.
69. Bishops and curates are bound to admit the commissaries of
apostolic pardons, with all reverence.
70. But still more are they bound to strain all their eyes and
attend with all their ears, lest these men preach their own
dreams instead of the commission of the pope.
71 . He who speaks against the truth of apostolic pardons, let
him be anathema and accursed!
72. But he who guards against the lust and license of the
pardon-preachers, let him be blessed!
73. The pope justly thunders against those who, by any art,
contrive the injury of the traffic in pardons.
74. But much more does he intend to thunder against those who
use the pretext of pardons to contrive the injury of holy love
and truth.
75. To think the papal pardons so great that they could
absolve a man even if he had committed an impossible sin and
violated the Mother of God -- this is madness.
76. We say, on the contrary, that the papal pardons are not
able to remove the very least of venial sins, so far as its
guilt is concerned.
77. It is said that even St. Peter, if he were now Pope, could
not bestow greater graces; this is blasphemy against St. Peter
and against the pope.
78. We say, on the contrary, that even the present pope, and
any pope at all, has greater graces at his disposal; to wit,
the Gospel, powers, gifts of healing, etc., as it is written
in I. Corinthians xii.
79. To say that the cross, emblazoned with the papal arms,
which is set up [by the preachers of indulgences], is of equal
worth with the Cross of Christ, is blasphemy.
80. The bishops, curates and theologians who allow such talk
to be spread among the people, will have an account to render.
81. This unbridled preaching of pardons makes it no easy
matter, even for learned men, to rescue the reverence due to
the pope from slander, or even from the shrewd questionings of
the laity.
82. To wit: -- "Why does not the pope empty purgatory, for the
sake of holy love and of the dire need of the souls that are
there, if he redeems an infinite number of souls for the sake
of miserable money with which to build a Church? The former
reasons would be most just; the latter is most trivial."
83. Again: -- "Why are mortuary and anniversary masses for the
dead continued, and why does he not return or permit the
withdrawal of the endowments founded on their behalf, since it
is wrong to pray for the redeemed?"
84. Again: -- "What is this new piety of God and the pope,
that for money they allow a man who is impious and their enemy
to buy out of purgatory the pious soul of a friend of God, and
do not rather, because of that pious and beloved soul's own
need, free it for pure love's sake?"
85. Again: -- "Why are the penitential canons long since in
actual fact and through disuse abrogated and dead, now
satisfied by the granting of indulgences, as though they were
still alive and in force?"
86. Again: -- "Why does not the pope, whose wealth is to-day
greater than the riches of the richest, build just this one
church of St. Peter with his own money, rather than with the
money of poor believers?"
87. Again: -- "What is it that the pope remits, and what
participation does he grant to those who, by perfect
contrition, have a right to full remission and participation?"
88. Again: -- "What greater blessing could come to the Church
than if the pope were to do a hundred times a day what he now
does once, and bestow on every believer these remissions and
participations?"
89. "Since the pope, by his pardons, seeks the salvation of
souls rather than money, why does he suspend the indulgences
and pardons granted heretofore, since these have equal
efficacy?"
90. To repress these arguments and scruples of the laity by
force alone, and not to resolve them by giving reasons, is to
expose the Church and the pope to the ridicule of their
enemies, and to make Christians unhappy.
91. If, therefore, pardons were preached according to the
spirit and mind of the pope, all these doubts would be readily
resolved; nay, they would not exist.
92. Away, then, with all those prophets who say to the people
of Christ, "Peace, peace," and there is no peace!
93. Blessed be all those prophets who say to the people of
Christ, "Cross, cross," and there is no cross!
94. Christians are to be exhorted that they be diligent in
following Christ, their Head, through penalties, deaths, and
hell;
95. And thus be confident of entering into heaven rather
through many tribulations, than through the assurance of
peace.
END
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