The Reformation

by Will Durant

  His defiance at Worms, and his survival, had given his followers a heady elation. At Erfurt students, artisans, and peasants attacked and demolished forty parish houses, destroyed libraries and rent rolls, and killed a humanist (June 1521). In the fall of that exciting year the Augustinian friars of Erfurt abandoned their monastery, preached the Lutheran creed, and denounced the Church as “mother of dogma, pride, avarice, luxury, faithlessness, and hypocrisy.”86 At Wittenberg, while Melanchthon composed his Loci communes rerum theologicarum (1521)—the first systematic exposition of Protestant theology—his fellow professor Carlstadt, now archdeacon of the Castle Church, demanded that Mass should be said (if at all) in the vernacular, that the Eucharist should be given in wine and bread without preliminary confession or fasting, that religious images should be removed from churches, and that the clergy—monks as well as secular priests—should marry and procreate. Carlstadt set a pace by marrying, at forty, a girl of fifteen (January 19,1522).

  Luther approved of this marriage, but “Good Heavens!” he wrote, “will our Wittenbergers give wives to monks?”87 Nevertheless he found something attractive in the idea, for he sent to Spalatin (November 21, 1521) a treatise On Monastic Vows, defending their repudiation. Spalatin delayed its publication, for it was unconventionally frank. It accepted the sexual instinct as natural and irrepressible, and declared that monastic vows were lures of Satan, multiplying sins. Four years would elapse before Luther himself would marry; his belated appreciation of woman apparently played no part in inaugurating the Reformation.

  The revolution proceeded. On September 22, 1521, Melanchthon administered communion in both kinds; here the Utraquists of Bohemia won a delayed victory. On October 2 3 the Mass ceased to be said in Luther’s monastery. On November 12 thirteen of the monks walked out of the cloister and headed for marriage; soon a similar exodus would empty half the monasteries of Germany. On December 3 some students and townsfolk, armed with knives, entered the parish church of Wittenberg, drove the priests from the altars, and stoned some worshipers who were praying before a statue of the Virgin. On December 4 forty students demolished the altars of the Franciscan monastery in Wittenberg. On that same day Luther, still disguised as a Junker, clandestinely visited the city, approved the marriage of the monks, but warned clergy and laity against violence. “Constraint,” he said, “is not all ruled out, but it must be exercised by the constituted authorities.”88 On the morrow he returned to the Wartburg.

  Shortly thereafter he sent to Spalatin, for publication, an Earnest Exhortation for All Christians, Warning Them against Insurrection and Rebellion. He feared that if the religious revolution went too fast, or became a social revolution, it would alienate the nobility and destroy itself. But its opening pages were themselves criticized as an incitation to violence:

  It seems probable that there is danger of an uprising, and that priests, monks, bishops, and the entire spiritual estate may be murdered or driven into exile, unless they seriously and thoroughly reform themselves. For the common man has been brooding over the injury he has suffered in property, in body, and in soul, and has become provoked. They have tried him too far, and have most unscrupulously burdened him beyond measure. He is neither able nor willing to endure it longer, and could indeed have good reason to lay about him with flails and cudgels, as the peasants are threatening to do. Now I am not at all displeased to hear that the clergy are brought to such a state of fear and anxiety. Perhaps they will come to their senses and moderate their mad tyranny.... I will go further. If I had ten bodies, and could acquire so much favor with God that he would chasten them [the clergy] by the gentle means [Fuchsschivanz—the fox’s fluffy tail] of bodily death or insurrection, I would most gladly give all my ten bodies to death in behalf of the poor peasants.89

  Nevertheless, he went on, it is inadvisable for private individuals to use force; vengeance is God’s.

  Insurrection is unreasoning, and generally hurts the innocent more than the guilty. Hence no insurrection is ever right, no matter how good the cause in whose interest it is made. The harm resulting from it always exceeds the amount of reformation accomplished.... When Sir Mob [Herr Omnes—Mister Everybody] breaks loose he cannot tell the wicked from the godly; he strikes at random, and then horrible injustice is inevitable.... . My sympathies are and always will be with those against whom insurrection is made.90

  Revolution, more or less peaceful, continued. On Christmas Day 1521, Carlstadt celebrated Mass in German, in civilian dress, and invited all to receive communion by taking the bread in their hands and drinking from the chalice. About this time Gabriel Zwilling, a leader of the Augustinian Congregation, invited his hearers to burn religious pictures and demolish altars wherever found. On December 27 oil was poured upon the fire by “prophets” arriving from Zwickau. That town was one of the most industrial in Germany, having a large population of weavers under a municipal government of merchant employers. A socialist movement among the workers was encouraged by echoes and memories of the suppressed Taborite experiment that had agitated near-by Bohemia. Thomas Münzer, pastor of the weavers’ church of St. Catherine, became the mouthpiece of their aspirations, and at the same time an enthusiastic supporter of the Reformation. Realizing that Luther’s exaltation of the Bible as the sole rule of faith opened the question who should interpret the text, Münzer and two associates—Nicholas Storch the weaver and Marcus Stübner the scholar—announced that they were singularly qualified as interpreters, for they felt themselves directly inspired by the Holy Ghost. This divine spirit, they declared, bade them defer baptism till maturity; for the sacrament could have effect only through faith, which was not to be expected of babies. The world, they predicted, was soon to suffer a general devastation, in which all ungodly men—including especially all orthodox priests—would perish; thereafter the communistic Kingdom of God would begin on earth.91 In 1521 an insurrection of the weavers was put down, and the three “Zwickau Apostles” were banished. Münzer went to Prague, was expelled, and took a pastorate in Allstedt in Saxony. Storch and Stübner went to Wittenberg, and in the absence of Luther they made a favorable impression on Melanchthon and Carlstadt.

  On January 6, 1522, the Augustinian Congregation at Wittenberg completely disbanded. On January 22 Carlstadt’s adherents were strong enough in the municipal council to carry a decree ordering all images to be removed from Wittenberg churches, and prohibiting Mass except in Carlstadt’s simplified form. Carlstadt included the crucifix among forbidden images, and, like the early Christians, banned music from religious services. “The lascivious notes of the organ,” he said, “awaken thoughts of the world. When we should be meditating on the sufferings of Christ we are reminded of Pyramus and Thisbe.... . Relegate organs, trumpets, and flutes to the theater.”92 When the agents of the council proved dilatory in removing images, Carlstadt led his followers into the churches; pictures and crucifixes were torn from the walls, and resisting priests were pelted with stones.93 Accepting the view of the Zwickau Prophets—that God speaks directly to men as well as through the Scriptures, and speaks rather to the simple in mind and heart than to the learned in languages and books—Carlstadt, himself erudite, proclaimed that schools and studies were deterrents to piety, and that real Christians would shun all letters and learning, and would become illiterate peasants or artisans. One of his followers, George Mohr, dismissed the school that he taught, and exhorted the parents to keep their children innocent of letters. Several students left the university and went home to learn a handicraft, saying that there was no further need for study.

  Hearing of all this, Luther feared that his conservative critics would soon be justified in their frequent predictions that his repudiation of ecclesiastical authority would loosen all bonds of social discipline. Defying the Emperor’s ban, and waiving all protection by the Elector should Charles seek to arrest him, Luther left his castle, resumed his monastic robe and tonsure, and hurried back to Wittenberg. On March 9, 1522, he began a series of eight sermons that stern
ly called the university, the churches, and the citizens to order. He now rejected all appeals to force; had he not freed millions of men from ecclesiastical oppression without lifting more than a pen? “Follow me,” he said. “I was the first whom God entrusted with this matter; I was the one to whom He first revealed how His Word should be preached to you. Therefore you have done wrong in starting such a piece of work without .... having first consulted me.... .94 Give me time.... Do not suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused. Men can go wrong with wine and women; shall we then prohibit wine and abolish women? The sun, the moon, the stars, have been worshiped; shall we then pluck them out of the sky? “95 Those who wished to keep pictures, statuary, crucifixes, music, or the Mass should not be interfered with; he himself approved of religious images.96 He arranged that in one Wittenberg church the Mass should be performed according to the traditional rite; in another, communion was administered in bread alone at the high altar, but in bread and wine at a side altar. The form, said Luther, made little difference; what counted was the spirit in which the Eucharist was received.

  He was at his best and most Christian in those eight sermons in eight days. He risked all on being able to win Wittenberg back to moderation, and he succeeded. The Zwickau Prophets sought to convert him to their views, and offered, as proof of their divine inspiration, to read his thoughts. He accepted the challenge; they answered that he was feeling a secret sympathy for their ideas; he attributed their clairvoyance to the Devil, and ordered them to leave Wittenberg. Carlstadt, dismissed from his posts by a reconstructed town council, took a pastorate in Orlamünde, from whose pulpit he denounced Luther as a “gluttonous ecclesiastic .... the new Wittenberg pope.”97 Anticipating the Quakers, Carlstadt abandoned all clerical garb, donned a plain gray coat, dispensed with titles, asked to be called “Brother Andreas,” refused payment for his ministry, earned his living at the plow, renounced all use of drugs, preferred prayer to medicine, advocated polygamy as Biblical, and adopted a merely symbolical view of the Eucharist. At the Elector’s request Luther went to Orlamünde to preach against him, but was pelted out of the town with stones and mud.98 When the Peasants’ Revolt collapsed, Carlstadt, fearing arrest as an instigator, sought and received refuge with Luther. After much wandering, the tired radical found port as a professor in Basel, and there, in 1541, he achieved a peaceful scholastic death.

  VII. THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH

  Luther resumed the uneven tenor of his ways as priest to his congregation and professor in the university. The Elector paid him 200 guilders ($5,000?) a year, to which each student added a slight honorarium for attending his lectures. Luther and another monk, now both in layman’s garb, lived in the Augustinian monastery with a student servant. “My bed was not made up for a whole year, and became foul with sweat. But I worked all day, and was so tired at night that I fell into bed without knowing that anything was amiss.”99 Hard work made his appetite forgivable. “I eat like a Bohemian and drink like a German, thank God, Amen.”100 He preached often, but with humane brevity, and in simple, vigorous language that held his rough auditors in hand. His only recreations were chess and the flute; but he seems to have enjoyed more the hours that he spent in attacking “papists’.” He was the most powerful and uninhibited controversialist in history. Nearly all his writings were warfare, salted with humor and peppered with vituperation. He let his opponents elaborate superior Latin to be read by a few scholars; he too wrote Latin when he wished to address all Christendom; but most of his diatribes were composed in German, or: were at once translated into German, for his was a nationalist revolution. No other German author has equaled him in clarity or force of style, in directness and pungency of phrase, in happy—sometimes hilarious—similes, in a vocabulary rooted in the speech of the people, and congenial to the national mind.

  Printing fell in with his purposes as a seemingly providential innovation, which he used with inexhaustible skill; he was the first to make it an engine of propaganda and war. There were no newspapers yet, nor magazines; battles were fought with books, pamphlets, and private letters intended for publication. Under the stimulus of Luther’s revolt the number of books printed in Germany rose from 150 in 1518 to 990 in 1524. Four fifths of these favored the Reformation. Books defending orthodoxy were hard to sell, while Luther’s were the most widely purchased of the age. They were sold not only in bookstores but by peddlers and traveling students; 1,400 copies were bought at one Frankfurt fair; even in Paris, in 1520, they outsold everything else. As early as 1519 they were exported to France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, England. “Luther’s books are everywhere and in every language,” wrote Erasmus in 1521; “no one would believe how widely he has moved men.”101 The literary fertility of the Reformers transferred the preponderance of publications from southern to northern Europe, where it has remained ever since. Printing was the Reformation; Gutenberg made Luther possible.,

  Luther’s supreme achievement as a writer was his translation of the Bible into German. Eighteen such translations had already been made, but they were based on Jerome’s Vulgate, were crowded with errors, and were awkwardly phrased. The difficulties of translating from the original were appalling; there were as yet no dictionaries from Hebrew or Greek into German; every page of text evoked a hundred problems of interpretation; and the German language itself was still crude and but half formed. For the New Testament Luther used the Greek text that Erasmus had edited with a Latin version in 1516. This part of the task was completed in 1521, and published in 1522. After twelve more years of labor, amid constant theological strife, but aided by Melanchthon and several Jewish scholars, Luther published the Old Testament in German. Despite their imperfect scholarship, these translations were epochal events. They inaugurated German literature, and established Neuhochdeutsch—the New High German of Upper Saxony—as the literary language of Germany. Yet the translations were deliberately unliterary, couched in the speech of the populace. In his usual vivid way Luther explained his method: “We must not, as asses do, ask the Latin letters how we should speak German, but we must ask the mothers in their houses, the children in the streets, the common people in the market place... we must be guided by them in translating; then they will understand us, and will know that we are speaking German to them.”102 Hence his translation had the same effect and prestige in Germany as the King James version in England a century later: it had endless and beneficent influence on the national speech, and is still the greatest prose work in the national literature. In Wittenberg, and during Luther’s lifetime, 100,000 copies of his New Testament were printed; a dozen unauthorized editions appeared elsewhere; and despite edicts forbidding its circulation in Brandenburg, Bavaria, and Austria, it became and remained the best-selling book in Germany. The translations of the Bible shared, as both effect and contributory cause, in that displacement of Latin by vernacular languages and literatures which accompanied the nationalist movement, and which corresponded to the defeat of the universal Church in lands that had not received and transformed the Latin tongue.

  Laboring so long on the Bible, and inheriting the medieval view of its divine authorship, Luther fondly made it the all-sufficient source and norm of his religious faith. Though he accepted some traditions not based on Scripture—like infant baptism and the Sunday Sabbath—he rejected the right of the Church to add to Christianity elements resting not on the Bible but on her own customs and authority, like purgatory, indulgences, and the worship of Mary and the saints. Valla’s revelation of the “Donation of Constantine” (the supposed bequest of Western Europe to the popes) as a hoary hoax of history had shaken the faith of thousands of Christians in the reliability of Church traditions and the compulsive validity of Church decrees; and in 1537 Luther himself translated Valla’s treatise into German. Tradition was human and fallible, but the Bible was accepted by nearly all Europe as the infallible word of God.

  Reason, too, seemed a weak instrument when compared with faith in a divine revelati
on. “We poor, wretched people... presumptuously seek to understand the incomprehensible majesty of the incomprehensible light of God’s wonders.... We look with blind eyes, like a mole, on the glory of God.”103 You cannot, said Luther, accept both the Bible and reason; one or the other must go.

  All the articles of our Christian faith, which God has revealed to us in His Word, are in presence of reason sheerly impossible, absurd, and false. What (thinks that cunning little fool) can be more absurd and impossible than that Christ should give us in the Last Supper His body and blood to eat and drink?... or that the dead should rise again at the last day?—or that Christ the Son of God should be conceived, borne in the womb of the Virgin Mary, become man, suffer, and die a shameful death on the cross?104 .. . Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has.105 .... She is the Devil’s greatest whore... a whore eaten by scab and leprosy, who ought to be trodden underfoot and destroyed, she and her wisdom.... Throw dung in her face... drown her in baptism.106

  Luther condemned the Scholastic philosophers for making so many concessions to reason, for trying to prove Christian dogmas rationally, for trying to harmonize Christianity with the philosophy of that “cursed, conceited, wily heathen” Aristotle.107

  Nevertheless Luther took two steps in the direction of reason: he made the sermon, not ceremony, the center of religious ritual; and in the early days of his rebellion he proclaimed the right of every individual to interpret the Scriptures for himself. He drew up his own canon of authenticity for the books of the Bible: how far did they agree with the teaching of Christ? “Whatever does not preach Christ is not Apostolic, even though it be written by St. Peter or St. Paul.... . Whatever does preach Christ would be Apostolic even if it proceeded from Judas, Pilate, or Herod.”108 He rejected the Epistle of James, and called it an “epistle of straw,” because he could not reconcile it with Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith; he questioned the Epistle to the Hebrews because it seemed to deny the validity of repentance after baptism (thereby upholding the Anabaptists); and at first he rated the Apocalypse as an unintelligible farrago of promises and threats “neither Apostolic nor Prophetic.”109 “The Third Book of Esdras I throw into the Elbe.”110 Though based on whorish reason, most of his judgments on the canon of Scripture were accepted by later Biblical critics as intelligent and sound. “The discourses of the Prophets,” he said, “were none of them regularly committed to writing at the time; their disciples and hearers collected them subsequently.... . Solomon’s Proverbs were not the work of Solomon.” But Catholic opponents contended that his tests of authenticity and inspiration were subjective and arbitrary, and they predicted that after his example other critics would reject, according to their own tastes and views, other Scriptural books, until nothing would be left of the Bible as a basis for religious faith.