Heretics and Heroes

by Thomas Cahill

  Soon enough, there arrived in Wittenberg three semiliterate rejects from the large Saxon cloth town of Zwickau, who announced that they, not needing the direction of scripture, were directly inspired by God, who had imparted to them the news that the world was about to end. Philipp Melanchthon, a very young professor of Greek and a staunch admirer of Luther, was impressed, as were not a few other Wittenbergers. But these “Zwickau Prophets” were summarily evicted from their new refuge by an outraged Luther, who classified them and virtually all other innovators who would take reform beyond what he had proposed as Schwärmer (gushing nutcases). Not for him the wholesale despising of Christian tradition. He would continue to insist on infant baptism as the New Testament equivalent of the welcoming rite of circumcision and on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, as implied by Jesus’s so-called words of institution (“This is my body”; “This is my blood”)—another revered doctrine of the old church that the radicals were calling into question.

  The sudden hatching of so many figures more radical than Luther was of course laid at his door. Had he remained loyal to the old dispensation, none of this would have happened. His rebellion had encouraged these others, many of them sorely lacking in settled wisdom or even common sense. The conservative Luther, promoter and friend of local magistrates, who had never questioned the role of local or even national political authorities, was appalled.

  But the waves of Reformation could not be contained. Peasants of southwest Germany, toiling in the domains of the Black Forest, were now reading Luther’s New Testament for themselves, rekindling amid the fields and woodlands of der Schwarzwald the same spiritual sparks that had long ago lit the fires of rebellion in Wat Tyler’s England (this page and following). The uprising of 1524 spread west to Alsace, east across the entire swath of Germany north of the Alps as far as Bohemia, and farther north into Thuringia. The movement began to leap borders as miners struck in Hungary and farmers took up weapons in Switzerland, Austria, and even Poland. At its height, the Peasants’ War, as it came to be called, would stand as the largest armed rebellion in Europe prior to the French Revolution. The enemy was the landlord, clerical or lay—whoever exacted taxes and tithes from tenants.

  A horrified Luther published An Admonition to Peace, but as the emperor’s armies began their bloody march north against the ill-equipped and untrained peasants, Luther republished his tract with a hateful appendix, “Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants.” “Let everyone who can,” cried Luther shrilly, “smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel!” (Oh, really?) The widespread torture and hideous slaughter administered by the emperor’s armies, as well as by the forces of local lords, were without equal in the annals of Christian Europe.

  Alone of all his class, Frederick the Wise, on his deathbed, wondered if the uprisings represented divine punishment on European rulers who had for so long treated “common folk” so unjustly. In the far future, Marxists would dishonestly claim these rebelling, gospel-inspired peasant farmers as their precursors. A far more secure interpretation of these events would show that Luther’s known role as a collaborator in official injustice and horrendous bloodshed permanently diminished his standing in the eyes of many: outside militant Lutheran strongholds, he would never again be able to claim the unsullied mantle of Christ-connected leader of the Reformation. All the same, his subjectively framed theological challenge had already altered the face of the earth—or at least of the globally reaching Western world.

  1525–1564: FROM PRINCELY CONVERSIONS TO THE SECOND REFORMATION

  The bloody crushing of the peasant insurrections, accompanied by the unofficial spiritual demotion of Luther, left the religious direction of whole regions solely in the hands of rulers, whether princes or magistrates. It was in this context—the context of “Who’s in charge here?” rather than “What’s the right course of faith and practice?”—that Europe assumed its permanent religious divisions. A Latin phrase designating the ruler as the one who decides everything was pithy and apposite: Cujus regio, ejus religio (Whose region it is, his is the religion). And so it became.

  In the decade of the Peasants’ War, such territorial conversions were few, only Prussia, Hesse, and Saxony (under Frederick the Wise’s brother and successor, John the Constant) turning themselves into Lutheran states. But in the course of the 1530s, most of northern Germany became Lutheran. In the same decade all of Scandinavia adopted Lutheranism, Sweden having seceded from the Roman obedience as early as 1527. In every case, the change in religious adherence was brought about by the prince of the realm.

  Emperor Charles had no desire to stand by while his German subjects altered their religious obedience, even if the alterations were achieved at the behest of their God-appointed princes. But Charles had worse threats than newly converted German Lutherans to occupy his days and nights, especially the astonishing victories of the Ottoman Turks, advancing relentlessly against Charles’s eastern European territories under their seemingly unbeatable sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent. The last thing Charles needed, in addition to this monstrous threat in the East, was a rekindled Peasants’ War. Allowing Lutherans to be Lutherans—and thus assuring their loyalty—would surely be a lesser evil. In 1526, the imperial Diet of Speyer issued a decree permitting princely territories and independent cities to decide religious matters on their own. In effect, the condemnations of Worms were suspended. But only three years later, the suspension was suspended, impelling the Lutheran princes to band together in mutual defense in an alliance called the Schmalkaldic League (after the Thuringian town of Schmalkalden, where the alliance was made).

  In July 1546, only months after the death of Martin Luther, war erupted between the emperor and the League, ending in Charles’s smashing victory at Mühlberg and precipitating a considerable exodus of Protestants to other realms. Such waves of refugees would become an intermittent feature of Europe for the rest of the century. Though the terms of the peace were fairly gentle, alliances again began to shift, many Catholic princes deserting the emperor out of concern for their own autonomy. Meanwhile the French Catholic king, Henry II, joined up with the Lutherans for the sake of reducing Charles’s power. In 1555, the Peace of Augsburg was signed, bringing an end to all hostilities and leaving each realm free to adopt either Lutheranism or traditional Catholicism.

  But “uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” as Shakespeare will soon have the English king Henry IV observe. Charles, an epileptic whose enormous jaw made chewing difficult, preferred, whenever possible, to eat alone. Now, as painful gout (probably brought on by his difficulties in mastication and digestion) prevented him from leading his troops in battle, he had had enough. He had spent much of his adult life in the saddle, speeding into battles, and much of the rest of it attending to political and religious disputations. He left the Augsburg negotiations to his brother Ferdinand and retired to a Spanish monastery, where there was no religious discord and nothing ever changed. Ferdinand would become Charles’s successor as emperor, Charles’s very Spanish son Philip II becoming king of Spain and of its vast and diverse territories, including the Netherlands, southern Italy, and the Americas. One of Charles’s bastards, the dashing Don John of Austria, would in 1571 halt at last the advance into Europe of the Turks and their Moorish confederates at the Battle of Lepanto.2

  In the second half of the sixteenth century, many Lutherans turned, not only against the Schwärmer, but against one another, as various groups arose to insist on their interpretation of the dead Luther’s legacy. Though much of this internecine squabbling was put to rest in 1577 by the Formula of Concord, much of the inventive informality of Luther’s spirit was lost; and much of Lutheranism turned into the cold, uptight, judgmental sort of society dramatized by Ingmar Bergman in such films as Winter Light.

  Many of the dissidents whom Luther disdained did indeed turn out to be nutcases, ecstatics predicting the world’s end and/or the
ir own messiahhood. To take but two examples: in the Swiss town of Saint Gallen in 1524, women who thought themselves inspired by God cut their hair short—a shocking sight at the time—so as to spare men lustful thoughts; then, after one of their number announced herself the New Messiah (and, subsequently, that she was carrying the Antichrist in her womb!), a separate faction, who believed themselves to have already “passed through death,” began to offer their bodies to devout men. There seemed no extreme of interpretation to which some of the newly literate would not go. (The women had begun cutting their hair after reading Paul to the Corinthians.) In the early 1530s, the German city of Münster became a magnet for northern Christian radicals, many of them Anabaptists from the Low Countries. Their leader, John of Leyden, gorged on delicacies while his followers came close to starvation. John also availed himself of a considerable harem of Münster’s most attractive young women till the city was surrounded by a joint army of Catholics and Lutherans, who eventually and with sadistic delight put the radicals to the torch.3

  But there were also many supposed Schwärmer who were thoughtful, gentle folk, in all likelihood the most thoughtful, gentle people of their era. Among these were the majority of Anabaptists in the Hapsburg territories, as well as similar movements there and elsewhere, notably the Hutterites in the Tyrol and the Bohemian Brethren, who were the descendants of the Hussites. These were all people who so deplored war and any kind of violence that they either tended toward pacifism or espoused it openly, who valued communal living and the sharing of goods, and who were the first human beings in history to encourage universal literacy.

  They also endured the most horrifying deaths recorded in this period, for both Protestants and Catholics found their continued existence intolerable. Many were burned at the stake by more orthodox Christians or—to make the punishment fit the crime—drowned in deep rivers in the midst of their adult baptism ceremonies. It became a sort of Sunday treat to spy on these sweet souls, find out where they were assembling, surround them in a mob, and hold each heretic under water till he or she stopped moving.

  One of their leaders, the humble and poetic Balthasar Hubmaier, who had been tortured for seven months, then banished from Zurich by Zwingli, was again tortured, then burned at the stake in Vienna. He cried out valorously, as his executioners rubbed gunpowder into his beard and hair (so that the fire might have its most spectacularly cruel effects), “Oh salt me, salt me well!” Once his head was blown up and his body burned to a crisp, his admirable wife, Elsbeth, who had stood by him through his worst ordeals, had a stone tied around her neck and was drowned in the Danube. All this in 1528 at the behest of the Catholic emperor Ferdinand. But it must be added that this militant destruction of Anabaptists was almost the only deed on which Catholics and Protestants could congratulate one another.

  As early as the late 1530s, another pattern of Reformation was already gathering strength and adherents. A Frenchman whose name was Jehan Cauvin (later spelled “Jean Calvin” to both modernize and Latinize it), already an exile on account of his religious opinions, stopped in Geneva en route to Basel. Unlike Luther, Calvin, a lawyer-preacher who never served as a pastor, was one tightly wound dude, pious but calculating, theoretically inclined but sparing of speech (at least outside the pulpit). And also unlike Luther, who shared with us news even of his bowel movements, next to nothing is known about the private Calvin, his habits, inclinations, friends. Calvin was also quite distinct from Luther in his devotion to ecclesiastical detail, to polity, and to government by committee. Geneva’s city authorities soon found him such an overweening presence that they threw him out, which brought Calvin to the German border city of Strassburg (one day to become French Strasbourg), where Martin Bucer, a former Dominican, was turning the city into a model of reformed practice and where Calvin picked up valuable pointers. (The Strassburg authorities would eventually throw out Bucer, who would end up in England.)

  But the Genevan authorities soon found the clashing chords of reformation more than their ears could bear. They began to despair of sorting out the many do-it-yourself versions of Christianity being proposed by various factions. How would they ever re-establish civic harmony? Then they recalled the quiet, almost scary intelligence and resolve of the exiled Frenchman. However much Calvin might rub them the wrong way with his certitudes and conviction of divine purpose, he would know how to bring order to this chaos. They swallowed their pride and invited him back.

  Calvin’s one great text, Institution of the Christian Religion (or the Institutes, as it is commonly known), was his attempt to create a sort of Protestant Summa Theologica, and he rewrote and expanded it over a lifetime. “Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves,” he begins coolly, then proceeds to a sort of recap of Luther’s Slavery of the Will, but emphasizing God’s predestination of all mankind with a cold precision and exclusiveness that Luther tended to avoid. God in his infinite wisdom has elected from all eternity to save some (the few) and damn others (the many). But you can sorta know who is saved and who damned, because the saved listen to the Word and act in consequence; everyone else is damned.

  Calvin’s text is also very un-Luther-like in its attention to church structure, which Luther, the ex-monk who never actually shepherded a congregation, never attended to closely. This attention to structure has resulted in the administrative order of both the Presbyterian and the Dutch (and other similar) Reformed churches, all of which tend to be at least quasi-democratic and layered with committees and a variety of overseeing bodies (companies, consistories, synods, presbyteries).

  The most significant theological difference between the Lutheran and Calvinist legacies lies in their division over the Eucharist: for Lutherans, Christ is really present; for Calvinists, the Eucharist may be richly symbolic, but nothing more. These stances proved insurmountable obstacles to forging a unified Protestant front. For Lutherans, indeed, Calvin was as bad as the pope. As a carved rhyme, once displayed proudly on an old Wittenberg house, puts it:

  GOTTES WORT UND LUTHERS SCHRIFT

  IST DAS BABST UND CALVINI GIFT

  GOD’S WORD AND LUTHER’S WRITING

  ARE POISON TO THE POPE AND CALVIN4

  This rigidly intolerant Lutheranism, closely tied to Norse-Germanic ethnic groups, had nowhere to grow. Calvin’s Reformation, however, made a point of seeking out forms of agreement with relatively like-minded groups in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Poland-Lithuania, Transylvania, and even inaccessible Scotland, where the itinerant preacher John Knox established his famously dour Scottish Presbyterianism. Ecumenical documents such as the Heidelberg Catechism and the Second Helvetic Confession assisted in creating a widespread, if loosely binding, unity among diverse populations. This Second Reformation could then go on to attract adherents far beyond its European soil of origin—in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, where converts eventually swelled the numbers of the many churches that place “Reformed,” rather than “Catholic” or “Lutheran,” in their names.

  Perhaps the most significant innovation of Calvinism was the bright line it drew between church and state. Pastors, doctors of religion, church elders, and deacons—the four (biblically supported) ecclesiastical officers of Calvin’s scheme—were far more independent of state authorities than they had been for Luther. The churchmen could, for instance, enforce ecclesiastical discipline, such as excommunication and other forms of condemnation, without consulting magistrates or princes. It was just this freedom of the church establishment from political influence that had originally been found so bothersome to Geneva’s politicians. But it would also prove to be the first step in the long evolution of the democratic doctrine of the separation of church and state.

  Of course, the Calvinist means of enforcing discipline could be pretty harsh. In Scotland, recognized sinners were made to sit separately in church, facing the congregation, so that everyone could stare at them throughout the service. And
it didn’t take all that much sinning to get yourself assigned to the penitents’ bench. In New England, where the Puritans, who were super-Calvinists, held sway, their methodical cruelty is remembered to this day in the vividly chilling stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. And in Geneva, Calvin himself presided augustly over the burning of Michael Servetus (originally Miguel Serveto of Spain), a brilliant, gentle, and trusting medical doctor, often credited today as the father of Unitarianism, who came to Geneva counting on Calvin’s protection. But Calvin, who had read a copy of Michael’s book, Christianismi Restitutio (The Restoration of Christianity), which Michael had sent him, knew that its author questioned the doctrine of the Trinity, which Michael argued derived from the Greek philosophers rather than from the New Testament.5 Michael also questioned Calvin’s cherished doctrine of predestination, insisting that God condemns no one who does not condemn himself by his own evil actions. Indeed, Michael’s very title sounded to Calvin like a gong of repudiation to his own Institution of the Christian Religion.