The Reformation

by Will Durant

  In Austria the revolt continued for a year. In January 1526, Michael Gasmaier proclaimed throughout Tirol the most radical of the revolutionary programs. All “godless” (i.e., non-Protestants) who persecuted the true Word of God, or who oppressed the common man, were to be put to death. All pictures and shrines were to be removed from the churches, and no Masses were to be said. Town walls, towers, and fortresses were to be demolished; there should now be only villages, and all men were to be equal. Officials and judges were to be chosen by universal adult male suffrage. Feudal rents and dues were to end at once; tithes were to be collected, but were to be given to the Reformed Church and the poor. Monasteries were to be converted into hospitals or schools. Mines were to be nationalized. Prices were to be fixed by the government.38 For a time Gasmaier, with clever strategy, defeated the troops sent against him, but he was finally outwitted, and fled to Italy. The Archduke Ferdinand set a price on his head, and two Spanish cutthroats earned the sum by assassinating him in his room in Padua (1528).

  The losses of German life and property in the Peasants’ Revolt were to be exceeded only in the Thirty Years’ War. Of peasants alone some 130,000 died in battle or in expiation. There were 10,000 executions under the jurisdiction of the Swabian League; Truchsess’ executioner boasted that he had killed 1,200 condemned men with his own practiced hand. The peasants themselves had destroyed hundreds of castles and monasteries. Hundreds of villages and towns had been depopulated or ruined, or impoverished by huge indemnities. Over 50,000 homeless peasants roamed the highways or hid in the woods. Widows and orphans were legion, but charity was heartless or penniless. The rebels had in many instances burned the charters that recorded their feudal dues; new charters were now drawn up, renewing the obligations, sometimes more leniently, sometimes more rigorously, than before. Concessions were made to the peasants in Austria, Baden, and Hesse; elsewhere serfdom was strengthened, and would continue, east of the Elbe, till the nineteenth century. Democratic beginnings were aborted. Intellectual developments were stunted; censorship of publications increased, under Catholic and Protestant authorities alike. Humanism wilted in the fire; the Renaissance joy in life and literature and love gave way to theology, pietism, and meditations on death.

  The Reformation itself almost perished in the Peasants’ War. Despite Luther’s disclaimers and denunciations, the rebellion had flaunted Protestant colors and ideas: economic aspirations were dressed in phrases that Luther had sanctified; communism was to be merely a return to the Gospel. Charles V interpreted the uprising as “a Lutheran movement.”39 Conservatives classed the expropriation of ecclesiastical property by Protestants as revolutionary actions on a par with the sacking of monasteries by peasants. In the south the frightened princes and lords renewed their fealty to the Roman Church. In several places, as at Bamberg and Würzburg, men even of the propertied class were executed for having accepted Lutheranism.40 The peasants themselves turned against the Reformation as a lure and a betrayal; some called Luther Dr. Lügner—” Dr. Liar”—and “toady of the princes.”41 For years after the revolt he was so unpopular that he seldom dared leave Wittenberg, even to attend his father’s deathbed (1530). “All is forgotten that God has done for the world through me,” he wrote (June 15, 1525); “now lords, priests, and peasants are all against me, and threaten my death.” 42

  It was not in his character to yield ground or apologize. On May 30, 1525, he wrote to Nicholas Amsdorf: “My opinion is that it is better that all peasants be killed than that the princes and magistrates perish, because the rustics took the sword without divine authority.”43 In July 1525, he published An Open Letter Concerning the Hard Book against the Peasants. His critics, he said, deserved no answer; their criticisms showed them to be rebels at heart, like the peasants, and no more deserving of mercy; “the rulers ought to seize these people by the cap and make them hold their tongues.” 44

  If they think this answer is too hard, and that this is talking violence and only shutting men’s mouths, I reply that this is right. A rebel is not worth answering with arguments, for he does not accept them. The answer for such mouth is a fist that brings blood from the nose. The peasants would not listen... their ears must be unbuttoned with bullets, till their heads jump off their shoulders. Such pupils need such a rod. He who will not hear God’s Word when it is spoken with kindness must listen to the headsman when he comes with his axe.... Of mercy I will neither hear nor know anything, but give heed to God’s will in His Word.... If He will have wrath and not mercy, what have you to do with mercy? Did not Saul sin by showing mercy upon Amalek when he failed to execute God’s wrath as he had been commanded? .... You who are praising mercy so highly because the peasants are beaten, why did you not praise it when the peasants were raging, smiting, robbing, burning, and plundering, until they were terrible to men’s eyes and ears? Why were they not merciful to the princes and lords, whom they wanted to wipe out entirely?

  Mercy, Luther argued, is the duty of Christians in their private capacity; as officers of the state, however, they must normally follow justice rather than mercy, for since Adam and Eve’s sin man has been so wicked that government, laws, and penalties are needed to control him. We owe more consideration to the community endangered by crime than to criminals endangering the community.

  If the intentions of the peasants had been carried out, no honest man would have been safe from them, but whoever had a pfennig more than another would have had to suffer for it. They had already begun that, and they would not have stopped there; women and children would have been put to shame; they would have taken to killing one another too, and there would have been no peace or safety anywhere. Has anything been heard of more unrestrained than a mob of peasants when they are fed full and have gotten power? .... The ass will have blows, and the people will be ruled by force.45

  Luther’s extreme statements about the Peasants’ War shock us today because social order has been so well established that we presume on its continuance, and can treat with lenience those few who would violently disturb it. But Luther faced the harsh reality of peasant bands transforming their just grievances into indiscriminate pillage, and threatening the complete overturn of law, government, production, and distribution in Germany. Events justified his premonition that the religious revolution for which he had risked his life would be gravely imperiled by the conservative reaction that was bound to follow an unsuccessful revolt. He may have felt some personal debt to the princes and nobles who had protected him in Wittenberg and Worms and the Wartburg, and he might well wonder who would save him against Charles V and Clement VII if princely power ceased to shield the Reformation. The one freedom that seemed to him worth fighting for was the freedom to worship God, to seek salvation according to one’s conscience. What difference did it make whether, in this brief Vorspiel to eternal life, one was a prince or a slave? We should accept our state here without complaint, bound in body and duty, but free in soul and the grace of God.

  And yet the peasants had a case against him. He had not only predicted social revolution, he had said he would not be displeased by it, he would greet it with a smile, even if men washed their hands in episcopal blood. He too had made a revolution, had endangered social order, had flouted authority not less divine than the state’s. He had made no protest against the secular appropriation of ecclesiastical property. How otherwise than by force could peasants better their lot when ballots were forbidden them, and their oppressors daily wielded force? The peasants felt that the new religion had sanctified their cause, had aroused them to hope and action, and had deserted them in the hour of decision. Some of them, in angry despair, became cynical atheists.46 Many of them, or their children, shepherded by Jesuits, returned to the Catholic fold. Some of them followed the radicals whom Luther had condemned, and heard in the New Testament a summons to communism.

  III. THE ANABAPTISTS TRY COMMUNISM: 1534–36

  Only by observing with what devout enthusiasm some of our contemporaries adopt economic heresies
can we understand the fervor with which pious rebellious minorities followed, even to the stake, one or another turn of the religious revolution in the sixteenth century.

  The most radical of the new sects took the name of Anabaptists (Wiedertäufer, Again-Baptizers) from its insistence that baptism, if given in infancy, should be repeated in maturity, and that still better it should be deferred, as by John the Baptist, till the mature recipient could knowingly and voluntarily make his profession of the Christian faith. There were sects within this sect. Those who followed Hans Denck and Ludwig Hätzer denied the divinity of Christ: He was only the most godly of men, Who had redeemed us not by His agony on the cross but by the example of His life.47 Denck exalted the individual conscience above the Church, the state, and the Bible itself. Most Anabaptists adopted a Puritan severity of morals and simplicity of manners and dress. Developing with rash logic Luther’s idea of Christian liberty, they condemned all government by force, and all resistance to it by force. They rejected military service on the ground that it is invariably sinful to take human life. Like the early Christians, they refused to swear oaths, not excepting oaths of allegiance to prince or emperor. Their usual salutation was “The peace of the Lord be with you”—an echo of the Jewish and Moslem greeting, and a forerunner of the Quaker mode. While Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and Knox agreed with the popes on the absurdity of religious toleration, the Anabaptists preached and practiced it; one of them, Balthasar Hübmaier, wrote the first clear defense of it (1524).48 They shunned public office and all resort to litigation. They were Tolstoyan anarchists three centuries before Tolstoy, and a century after Peter Chelcicky, from whom they may have derived their creed. Consciously or unwittingly inheriting the doctrine of the Bohemian Taborites or the Moravian Brethren, some Anabaptists proclaimed a community of goods;49 a few, if we may credit hostile chroniclers, proposed a community of wives.50 In general, however, the sect rejected any compulsory sharing of goods, advocated voluntary mutual aid, and held that in the Kingdom of Heaven communism would be automatic and universal.51 All the Anabaptist groups were inspired by the Apocalypse and the confident expectation of Christ’s early return to the earth; many believers professed to know the day and hour of His coming. Then all the ungodly—in this case all but Anabaptists—would be swept away by the sword of the Lord, and the elect would live in glory in a terrestrial paradise without laws or marriage, and abounding in all good things.52 So hopeful men steeled themselves against toil and monogamy.

  The Anabaptists appeared first in Switzerland. Perhaps a pacifistic Christianity had seeped in from the Waldenses of southern France and the Beghards of the Netherlands. Here and there, as in Basel, a few intellectuals sponsored the idea of a communistic society. Communistic passages in More’s Utopia may have stirred the scholars who gathered around Erasmus there. Three members of that circle became Anabaptist leaders: Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz of Zurich, and Balthasar Hübmaier of Waldshut—just across the border in Austria. In 1524 Münzer visited Waldshut, Carlstadt came to Zurich, and an Anabaptist sect formed in Zurich under the name of “Spirituals” or “Brethren.” It preached adult baptism and the coming of Christ, rejected Church and state, and proposed an end to interest charges, taxes, military service, tithes, and oaths.

  At this time Ulrich Zwingli was winning the Great Council of Zurich to his Protestant views, which included the control of religion by the secular authorities. He pleaded with the “Brethren” to relax their antipathy to the state, and to practice infant baptism; they refused. The Council summoned them to a public disputation (January 17, 1525); failing to convert them, it decreed that the parents of unbaptized children must leave the town. The Anabaptists denounced the Council, called Zwingli an old dragon, and paraded the streets crying, “Woe to Zurich!”53 Their leaders were arrested and banished, which enabled them to spread their doctrines. Saint-Gall and Appenzell took up the movement; Bern and Basel were stirred by it; Hübmaier won nearly all Waldshut to his views. In Appenzell 1,200 men and women, accepting literally the words of Christ—“Take no thought what ye shall eat”—sat down and waited for God to come and feed them.54

  The apparent success of the Peasants’ War in the spring of 1525 promoted these conversions, but its failure encouraged the propertied classes in the Swiss cities to repressive measures. The Council of Zurich arrested Manz (July), then Grebel, then Hübmaier, and ordered that all obstinate Anabaptists “should be laid in the tower,” kept on bread and water, and “left to die and rot.”55 Grebel did; Manz was drowned; Hübmaier recanted, was freed, recanted his recantation, and undertook to convert Augsburg and Moravia; Hätzer was beheaded at Constance for Anabaptism and adultery. Protestant and Catholic cantons showed equal energy in subduing the sect, and by 1530 nothing remained of it in Switzerland except some secret and negligible bands.

  Meanwhile the movement had spread like a rumor through South Germany. A zeal for evangelistic propaganda caught the converts, and turned them into ardent missionaries for the new creed. In Augsburg Denck and Hübmaier made rapid headway among the textile workers and the lower middle class. In Tirol many miners, contrasting their poverty with the wealth of the Fuggers and Hochstetters who owned the mines, took up Anabaptism when the Peasants’ Revolt collapsed. In Strasbourg the struggle between Catholics and Protestants allowed the sect to multiply unnoticed for a time. But a pamphlet of 1528 warned the authorities that “he who teaches that all things are” to be “in common has naught else in mind than to excite the poor against the rich, the subjects against the rulers ordained by God.”56 In that year Charles V issued a mandate making rebaptism a capital crime. The Diet of Speyer (1529) ratified the Emperor’s edict, and ordered that Anabaptists everywhere were to be killed like wild beasts as soon as taken, without judge or trial. An Anabaptist chronicler, perhaps exaggerating, reported the result in the mood of early Christian hagiographers:

  Some were racked and drawn asunder; others were burnt to ashes and dust; some were roasted on pillars or torn with red-hot pincers.... Others were hanged on trees, beheaded with the sword, or thrown into the water.... . Some starved or rotted in darksome prisons. Some who were deemed too young for execution were whipped with rods, and many lay for years in dungeons.... . Numbers had holes burnt into their cheeks.... The rest were hunted from one country and place to another. Like owls and ravens, which durst not fly by day, they were often compelled to hide and live in rocks and clefts, in wild forests, or in caves and pits.57

  By 1530, says the contemporary Sebastian Franck, 2,000 Anabaptists had been put to death. In one Alsatian city, Ensisheim, 600 were executed. In Salzburg those who recanted were allowed to have their heads cut off before being placed upon the pyre; the unrepentant were roasted to death over a slow fire (1528),58 Anabaptists composed touching hymns to commemorate these martyrdoms; and most of the hymn writers became martyrs in their turn.

  Despite these killings the sect increased, and moved into northern Germany. In Prussia and Württemberg some nobles welcomed the Anabaptists as peaceful and industrious farmers. In Saxony, says an early Lutheran historian, the valley of the Werra was filled with them, and in Erfurt they claimed to have sent forth 300 missionaries to convert the dying world. In Lübeck, Jürgen Wullenwever, who was accused of Anabaptism, briefly captured control of the city (1533–34). In Moravia, Hübmaier made progress with his moderate doctrine, which explained communism not as “common property,” but as holding that “one should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, and clothe the naked, for in truth we are not masters of our possessions, but stewards or dispensers only.”59 Hans Hut, fired by the teachings of Münzer, won the Anabaptists of Moravia away from Hübmaier by preaching a full community of goods. Hübmaier retired to Vienna, where he was burned at the stake, and his wife was thrown bound into the Danube (1528).

  Hut and his followers established a communist center at Austerlitz, where, as if foreseeing Napoleon, they renounced all military service, and denounced every kind of war. Confining themselves to till
age and petty industry, these Anabaptists maintained their communism for almost a century. The nobles who owned the land protected them as enriching the estates by their conscientious toil. Farming was communal among them; materials for agriculture and handicraft were bought and allotted by communal officers; part of the proceeds was paid to the landlord as rent, the rest was distributed according to need. The social unit was not the family but the Haushabe, or household, containing some 400 to 2,000 persons, with a common kitchen, a common laundry, a school, a hospital, and a brewery. Children, after weaning, were brought up in common, but monogamy remained. In the Thirty Years’ War, by an Imperial edict of 1622, this communistic society was suppressed; its members accepted Catholicism or were banished. Some of the exiles went to Russia, some to Hungary. We shall hear of them again.