Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  But Karlstadt doggedly pressed his position. Sharing Luther’s attachment to Paul and Augustine, he vociferously argued that man cannot of his own accord, and least of all through his works, do anything good except through an infusion of divine grace; all depends on God. Eck, hewing to the traditional Scholastic position, maintained that man can through his own efforts elicit God’s grace. For a full week they went back and forth on this and related points, Eck theatrically invoking Thomas and Lombard and a host of papal pronouncements on behalf of discretionary action, and Karlstadt haltingly appealing to Romans and Galatians and Augustine’s On the Spirit and the Letter to prove the ineradicability of human sinfulness. As profound and cosmic as the questions were, the debate itself was unbearably tedious and repetitious.

  Throughout it all, Luther sat in the upper chamber, watching along with everyone else. All those present had come to see him, not Karlstadt, and they wondered when they would get the chance. Finally, the way for his participation was cleared, and shortly before seven o’clock on the morning of July 4, 1519, the Wittenberg friar entered the arena. The atmosphere among the friars, officials, professors, and students in the hall turned electric as two of Germany’s leading theologians prepared to face off. (In a sad coincidence, Johann Tetzel on that same day died in the Dominican monastery a few hundred yards away.) All eyes were on the man who had spoken out so boldly against indulgences, who had so defiantly confronted Cajetan, who was being so relentlessly pursued by the Holy See. They saw a friar of medium height, whose body, though thickset, was worn so thin by his studies and rigors that one could “almost count his bones,” as an eyewitness put it. (According to some accounts, Luther carried a bouquet of pink flowers, which he sniffed from time to time.) Looking solemn in a black cowl over a white habit, Luther recognized the moment as a crucial test, placing him in full public view against a forceful spokesman for the Western Church.

  He and Eck began right in on the great issue dividing them—the authority of the pope. Eck vigorously pressed his position that the Roman Church was superior to all others, and to buttress his claim he self-assuredly cited Christ’s key admonitions on the subject, including “Thou art Peter” and “Feed my sheep.” Invoking Jerome, Dionysius the Areopagite, Cyprian, and various decretals, the wily professor maintained that Peter, following Christ’s instruction, had been the first bishop of Rome and that the popes as his successors had continued to fill that supreme seat of Christendom. The papacy was thus of incontestably divine origin.

  “I impugn these decretals,” Luther declared. While affirming his respect for the power of both the pope and the Church, he asserted that the office had been established not by Scripture but by men. Citing Luke, Colossians, and Augustine’s De Trinitate, Luther argued that the true head of the Church was not any man but Christ himself. Referring to the underlying Greek text of Matthew, he maintained that “the rock” was not Peter but Christ’s confession of faith, and that while Peter might have enjoyed special status, Christ had commissioned all of the apostles to carry his message. For a thousand years Greek Christians had not lived under the sway of the pope; did that mean they were all condemned? The earliest Fathers themselves had no pope to direct them; only with the reign of Sylvester I had the papacy come into being. Drawing on his recent study of ecclesiastical history, Luther tried to show how the principle of papal primacy had developed over time, especially through the decrees issued by Rome throughout the previous four centuries.

  During that first day’s discussion, both men showed off their vast knowledge of the Bible, the Fathers, and Church law, as well as their dexterity in deploying it. But the two seemed to belong to different eras. Eck the traditionalist took as indisputable the established teachings of the Church and sought to demonstrate them by drawing on the accepted body of patristic commentary and canon law. Luther the insurgent used his knowledge of languages and history to scrape away the successive layers of accrued interpretation of the Bible to get at its underlying meaning.

  Eck felt he needed an advantage, and on the morning of the second day, before a crowd still buzzing over the previous day’s exchanges, he found it. Luther, he alleged, in claiming that Peter was not the head of the Holy Church and that the papacy was not of divine origin, was echoing the views of John Wyclif and Jan Hus. This was an explosive charge, for Wyclif and Hus, along with Arius and Pelagius in earlier centuries, were considered arch-heretics, and to be linked to them in so prominent a setting was very dangerous. Vigorously protesting, Luther said that he had never approved of schismatics like the Hussites; even if the Bohemians had had divine right on their side, they should not have caused such a breach in the Church. Seeing how flustered Luther had become, Eck pressed the point, demanding to know how his position differed from that of the Bohemians. Luther continued to assert his innocence.

  At this point, the conclave broke for lunch, and Luther (apparently) took the opportunity to review the proceedings of the Council of Constance and the thirty articles of Hus’s that had been condemned there. Among them was one holding that “there is only one holy universal church, which is one with the total number predestined to salvation.” Others maintained that Peter was never the head of the Church and that to attain salvation it was not necessary to believe that the Roman Church is superior to all others. These statements were in line with Luther’s own readings of the Bible. When the session resumed at two o’clock, he repeated his disapproval of the Bohemian schism but added that it was “certain that many of the articles of Jan Hus and the Bohemians are plainly most Christian and evangelical” and that the universal Church could not condemn them.

  There was a moment of stunned silence. “The plague take him!” Duke George bellowed, and pandemonium broke out. After order was restored, Luther explained that whether the condemned articles were those of Wyclif or Hus, he did not care. Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and many Greek bishops had all been saved even though they had not believed it was necessary for salvation to regard the Roman Church as superior to all others. But the damage had been done, and Eck rejoiced at how readily Luther had taken his bait.

  The Hussite upheaval had faded from memory in much of Europe, but not in Saxony, and least of all in Leipzig. Located just 60 miles from the border with Bohemia and 120 miles from Prague, Hus’s center of activity, the city considered Bohemia a source of contagion that at any moment could infect institutions on the German side of the border. After Hus’s execution, Bohemia had been engulfed in war, and in Saxony there remained deserted villages that had been burned by Bohemian armies. The University of Leipzig itself had been founded out of the Bohemian chaos. To Duke George and other leading Saxons, then, the Hussite heresy testified to the violence that could result when dissent was allowed to grow unchecked.

  At that point, however, neither Duke George nor Luther had much idea who Hus actually was, or of the story behind his rebellion. In many key respects, Hus’s revolt anticipated that of Luther. Some, in fact, consider him the first Protestant.

  Jan Hus was named after the market village of Husinec in southern Bohemia where he was raised. In the early 1390s, he enrolled in the University of Prague, which, with five thousand to seven thousand students, was the most dynamic in Central Europe. After earning a bachelor’s degree in 1393 and a master’s degree in 1396, he began studying for a doctorate in theology. At the time, the views of John Wyclif were circulating in Prague. In 1382, the Czech princess Anne had married the English king Richard II, and some Czech students had gone to Oxford to study. There they were exposed to Wyclif’s ideas. On their return to Prague, they brought back some of his writings, and Hus, on reading them, was deeply affected, especially by his teaching that Scripture should be considered the supreme Christian authority.

  Around 1400 Hus was ordained a priest, and in 1402 he was appointed preacher at the Bethlehem chapel. The chapel had been founded a decade earlier to offer sermons in Czech and to push for ecclesiastical reform. From its pulpit, Hus inveighed against dissolute p
riests who spent their time gambling, dancing, and drinking. The Church had amassed enormous wealth in Bohemia, and Hus, condemning its greed and materialism, fed a surging sense of national identity. “Bohemia for the Bohemians” was the rallying cry. Such sentiments took root in opposition to not just Rome but also Germany. For decades, Bohemia had been overrun by Germans. Miners, merchants, and artisans had all come seeking their fortune, and as they advanced, they stirred intense resentment among the locals, especially at the university. With only two German universities (Heidelberg and Erfurt) then in operation, Prague was a popular place of study, and German professors occupied many key posts. Though making up only a fifth of the student body, the Czechs demanded more control, and in 1409 the university’s constitution was amended to provide it. Outraged, some 1,500 German students and instructors left, and a new university was established in Leipzig.

  In 1412, after antipope John XXIII declared a crusade against the excommunicated king of Naples and proclaimed a new indulgence for those joining it, Hus preached in opposition to it and to the more general idea of raising money to spill Christian blood. He was loudly supported by the Czech people, and papal agents were jeered at and harassed.

  After Hus resisted an order by the local archbishop to stop preaching, he was excommunicated. When he persisted, all of Prague was placed under an interdict. To help relieve the city, Hus left it, taking shelter in rural castles opened to him by sympathetic lords, and over the next two years he produced a flood of tracts. One of them, De Ecclesia (“On the Church”), would be the most influential work on the structure of the Church written in the period between Augustine and Luther. In it, Hus, borrowing liberally from Wyclif, condemned the entire ecclesiastical framework, including the papacy, which, he insisted, had no foundation in Scripture. The Church was ruled not by the pope or by cardinals but by Christ, who was its rock. A pope who lived contrary to Christ was, like any other perverted person, to be called Antichrist. Hus also supported offering the laity wine as well as bread during Communion—a violation of a centuries-old Church stricture.

  As popular as these ideas were in Bohemia, they were reviled in Rome, and in 1414 Hus was summoned to account for them at the Council of Constance. Convened to address both ecclesiastical reform and the papal schism that had opened up in 1378, the council would be one of the most important Catholic assemblies to take place during the Middle Ages. Provided a safe-conduct by the emperor-elect Sigismund, Hus in October 1414, accompanied by thirty men on horseback, left on the four-hundred-mile journey to Constance, a town picturesquely set on the western shore of the Alpine lake of the same name. On his arrival, Hus was at first treated civilly, but within a month a special commission ruled that a pledge with a heretic such as he need not be respected, and in violation of the safe-conduct he was thrown into a dungeon in the Dominican monastery on an island in the lake. Hus’s cell was close by the latrines, and the unsanitary conditions caused him to become gravely ill. In January 1415, he was transferred to another, slightly less wretched cell, but in March 1415 he was taken in chains by boat to the castle of the bishop of Constance, located on the Rhine outside the city’s walls. Confined on the top floor of a tower, Hus was free to walk about in fetters during the day, but at night he had his hands manacled to the wall near his bed.

  Finally, on June 8, 1415, after more than two months of such harsh confinement, he was summoned to a formal hearing. He was presented with some three dozen articles, most of them from De Ecclesia, that were deemed offensive and scandalous to the Church. Ordered to abjure them, Hus said he would do so only for those articles whose renunciation would not offend God or his conscience based on Scripture. The council countered that Scripture had to be interpreted not by the free judgment of individuals but by the authorized agents of the Church, and it insisted that Hus retract all of the articles without reservation. Citing his conscience, he refused.

  He was transferred to a tower adjoining the Franciscan friary. Despite suffering from hemorrhages, the stone, vomiting, headaches, and toothaches, Hus over the next month managed to write a series of warm letters to his friends, signing off with phrases like “bound in prison in chains” and “expecting a dreadful death.” Till the last moment, attempts were made to change his mind, without success. Finally, on July 6, 1415, after eight months of punishing confinement, he was summoned to the Constance cathedral, where the council was meeting. There, thirty of his articles were condemned as scandalous, erroneous, rash, unacceptable, and, in some cases, notoriously heretical, and De Ecclesia and all of his other books were ordered burned. Hus protested that not a single error had been pointed out to him, but he was ordered to keep silent.

  With virtually the whole population of Constance gathered in the streets, Hus was led to a meadow outside the city, where his place of execution had been prepared. His outer clothes were removed, his hands were tied behind his back, and his neck was chained to the stake. Two bundles of faggots were mixed with straw and piled around him up to his chin. Given a final opportunity to recant, Hus said that he was ready to die, and he sang hymns as he was roasted alive. To ensure that nothing remained that could become a relic, his skull was smashed, his heart was burned through, and his garments were fed to the flames.

  But Hus’s example and teachings would prove much harder to extinguish. When a courier arrived in Prague with the news of his execution, protests erupted. Five hundred leading Czech citizens signed a document proclaiming Hus an upright Christian, denouncing his execution as an insult to the country, and committing themselves to fight to the last drop of blood to defend the doctrines of Christ against those of man. Even while Hus was in prison, priests had begun administering Communion in both wine and bread, and the Eucharistic chalice became the symbol of revolt against Rome. There emerged two factions—the Utraquists, who favored gradual reform, and the Taborites, who supported an apocalyptic form of biblical purity. In 1419, an inflamed mob led by an insurrectionary preacher invaded the town hall and threw thirteen Catholic loyalists from an upper window to their deaths, in the “First Defenestration of Prague.” The following year, the Utraquists and Taborites agreed on a common program, the “Four Articles of Prague,” which advocated Communion in both kinds, clerical rectitude, preaching based solely on God’s Word, and a return to apostolic poverty.

  To neither Rome nor the emperor was any of this acceptable, and in 1420 the Holy See declared a crusade against the Bohemian heretics. Sigismund, accompanied by several German princes, arrived before Prague at the head of a vast army drawn from around Europe. Almost overnight a large Hussite army formed, and the crusaders were violently repulsed. No fewer than four subsequent crusades were mounted against the Bohemians, each of which was bloodily beaten back. Marching through Bohemia and Moravia, Hussite armies torched monasteries, slaughtered monks, and compelled the population to swear allegiance to the Four Articles. It was the first widespread destruction of monasteries and church art by Christians in the Latin West. The German settlers in Bohemia, who enjoyed great wealth and remained loyal to Rome, became a prime target, and many fled into Saxony and other parts of Germany. The Bohemians mounted “beautiful rides” across the border into Austria, Silesia, and Saxony, spreading terror with battle cries like “Warriors we of God” and “Kill, kill, kill, kill them, every man!” Bearing banners embroidered with the chalice, they fought and plundered their way up to the very walls of Leipzig.

  Eventually, the two Hussite factions fell on each other. Fifteen years of brutal warfare followed, forcing thousands to flee, reducing the peasants to serfdom, and leaving Prague in ruins. Peace finally came in 1436, and Rome was forced to tolerate an independent Hussite church. It was based on two key principles—Communion in both kinds and the use of the Czech language in worship. While the Hussites remained bitterly divided among themselves, Bohemia became the first region in Western Europe to slip from papal control—the ultimate consequence of the Church’s decision to execute Jan Hus.

  Rome, however, managed to kee
p the insurrection from spilling over Bohemia’s borders. All the neighboring lands remained in the Church’s orbit. Hus’s influence itself did not spread much beyond his homeland. Prior to the invention of printing, his works remained largely unavailable, and his ideas were little known.

  Luther had not read any of Hus’s works. The same was true of most of those in the audience at Leipzig. All they knew of Hus were the atrocities, anarchy, and devastation associated with his name. So when Luther was accused of Hussite sympathies, he vehemently objected. After the spectators in the hall had settled down, Eck—pressing his advantage—declared that the “reverend father” was confusing the holy Greeks with heretics and calling the pestilential errors of the Hussites most Christian.

  “I protest both to you and this gathering that you speak falsely and impudently about me,” Luther declared. Eck—swelling up like an adder, as Luther later put it—piled up patristic and Scholastic citations in an effort to show that Luther, in declaring certain Hussite articles most Christian and evangelical, had spoken against the sacred and honorable Council of Constance and in defense of the Hussite tenet that the Roman Church was not superior to all others. “This is a most impudent lie!” Luther shouted. The argument grew so heated and the crowd so unruly that the presiding judge had to admonish the participants to refrain from accusations and abuse.