by Will Durant
In 1519 plague struck Zurich, taking a third of the population in half a year. Zwingli stayed at his post, toiled night and day in the care of the sick, caught the infection himself, and came close to death. When he recovered he was the most popular figure in Zurich. Distant dignitaries like Pirkheimer and Dürer sent him felicitations. In 1521 he was made head priest of the Grossmünster. He was now strong enough to proclaim openly the Reformation in Switzerland.
III. THE ZWINGLIAN REFORMATION
Almost unconsciously, but as a natural result of his unusual education, he had changed the character of the pastorate in his church. Before him the sermon had counted for little; Mass and communion had been nearly all the service; Zwingli made the sermon dominate the ritual. He became teacher as well as preacher; and as his confidence grew he drove home ever more forcefully his conviction that Christianity should be restored to its early simplicity of organization and worship. He was deeply stirred by Luther’s revolt and writings, and by Huss’s treatise On the Church. By 1520 he was publicly attacking monasticism, purgatory, and the invocation of saints; furthermore, he argued that the payment of tithes to the Church should be purely voluntary, as in Scripture. His bishop begged him to withdraw these statements; he persisted; and the cantonal council supported him by ordering all priests within its jurisdiction to preach only what they found in the Bible. In 1521 Zwingli persuaded the council to forbid the enlistment of Swiss soldiery by the French; a year later the prohibition was extended to all foreign powers; and when Cardinal Schinner continued to recruit Swiss troops for the pope, Zwingli pointed out to his congregation that the Cardinal wore a red hat not without reason, for “if it were wrung you would see the blood of your nearest kindred drip from its folds.”8 Finding no text in the Testament for the avoidance of meat in Lent, he allowed his parishioners to ignore the Church’s rules for Lenten fasts. The bishop of Constance protested; Zwingli answered him in a book, Archeteles (beginning and end), which predicted a universal rebellion against the Church, and advised the prelates to imitate Caesar, fold their garments about them, and die with grace and dignity. With ten other priests he petitioned the bishop to end clerical immorality by allowing sacerdotal marriage (1522). He was at this time keeping Anna Reinhard as his mistress or secret wife, In 1524 he publicly married her, a year before Luther’s marriage to Catherine von Bora.
This definite rupture with the Church was preceded by two disputations that recalled the Leipzig debate of Luther and Eck, and distantly echoed the Scholastic disputations of the medieval universities. As a semi-democratic republic, Switzerland was not shocked by Zwingli’s suggestion that the differences between his views and those of his conservative opponents should receive an open and impartial hearing. The Great Council of Zurich, blithely assuming theological jurisdiction, invited the bishops to send representatives. They came in force, and altogether some 600 persons gathered for the exciting contest in the city hall (January 25, 1523).
Zwingli offered to defend sixty-seven theses.
1. All who say that the Gospel is nothing without the approbation of the Church err.....
15. In the Gospel the whole truth is clearly contained.....
17. Christ is the one eternal high priest. Those who pretend to be high priests resist, yea, set aside, the honor and dignity of Christ.
18. Christ, Who offered Himself once on the cross, is the sufficient and perpetual sacrifice for the sins of all believers. Therefore the Mass is no sacrifice, but a commemoration of the one sacrifice of the cross.....
24. Christians are not bound to any works which Christ has not commanded. They may eat at all times all kinds of food.....
28. Whatsoever God permits and has not forbidden is right. Therefore marriage is becoming to all men.....
34. The spiritual power so called [the Church] has no foundation in the Holy Scriptures and the teaching of Christ.
35. But the secular power is confirmed by the teaching and example of Christ (Luke, ii, 5; Matt., xxii, 21)....
49. I know of no greater scandal than the prohibition of lawful marriage to priests, while they are permitted, on payment of a fine, to have concubines. Shame! (Pfui der Schande!) ...
57. The Holy Scripture knows nothing of a purgatory.....
66. All spiritual superiors should repent without delay, and set up the cross of Christ alone, or they will perish. The axe is laid to the root.9
Johann Faber, Vicar-General of the diocese of Constance, refused to discuss these propositions in detail, claiming that they should be laid before great universities or a general council of the Church. Zwingli thought this unnecessary; now that the New Testament was available in the vernaculars, all could have the Word of God to decide these issues; that was enough. The Council agreed; it declared Zwingli guiltless of heresy, and bade all Zurich clergymen to preach only what they could establish by Scripture. Here, as in Lutheran Germany, the state took over the Church.
Most priests—their salaries being now guaranteed by the state—accepted the Council’s order. Many of them married, baptized in the vernacular, neglected the Mass, and abandoned the veneration of images. A band of enthusiasts began indiscriminately to destroy pictures and statues in the churches of Zurich. Disturbed by the spread of violence, Zwingli arranged a second disputation (October 26, 1523), which was attended by 550 laymen and 350 clergymen. The outcome was an order of the Council that a committee including Zwingli should prepare a booklet of doctrinal instruction for the people, and that meanwhile all violence should cease. Zwingli rapidly composed Eine kurze Christliche Einleitung, which was sent to all the clergy of the canton. The Catholic hierarchy protested, and the Diet of the Confederation, meeting at Lucerne (January 26, 1524), seconded the protest, at the same time pledging itself to ecclesiastical reform. The Council ignored the protests.
Zwingli formulated his doctrine more amply in two Latin treatises: De vera et falsa religione (1525) and Ratio fidei (1530). He accepted the basic theology of the Church—a triune God, the Fall of Adam and Eve, the Incarnation, Virgin Birth, and Atonement; but he interpreted “original sin” not as a taint of guilt inherited from our “first parents,” but as an unsocial tendency inherent in the nature of man.10 He agreed with Luther that man can never earn salvation by good works, but must believe in the redeeming efficacy of Christ’s sacrificial death. He agreed with Luther and Calvin on predestination: every event, and therefore every individual’s eternal fate, has been foreseen by God, and must occur as so foreseen. But God has fated for damnation only those who reject the Gospel offered them. All children (of Christian parents) who die in infancy are saved, even if unbaptized, for they were too young to sin. Hell is real, but purgatory is “a figment .... a lucrative business for its authors”; Scripture knows nothing of it.11 The sacraments are not miraculous vehicles, but useful symbols, of divine grace. Auricular confession is unnecessary; no priest—only God—can forgive sin; but it is often beneficial to confide our spiritual troubles to a priest.12 The Lord’s Supper is no actual eating of the body of Christ, but a symbol of the union of the soul with God, and of the individual with the Christian community.
Zwingli kept the Eucharist as part of the Reformed service, and administered it in both bread and wine, but he offered it only four times a year. In that occasional celebration much of the Mass was retained, but it was recited in Swiss German by congregation and priest. During the remainder of the year the Mass was replaced by the sermon; the appeal of ritual to the senses and the imagination was subordinated to the appeal of discourse to the mind—a rash gamble on popular intelligence and the stability of ideas. Since an infallible Bible had now to substitute for an infallible Church as a guide to doctrine and conduct, Luther’s German translation of the New Testament was adapted to the Swiss German dialect, and a corps of scholars and divines, led by the saintly Leo Jud, was commissioned to prepare a German version of the entire Bible. This was published by Christian Froschauer at Zurich in 1534, four years before Luther’s better version appeared.
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In faithful obedience to the Second Commandment, and signalizing the return of Protestant Christianity to its early Jewish traditions, the Zurich Council ordered the removal of all religious images, relics, and ornaments from the churches of the city; even the organs were banished, and the immense interior of the Grossmünster was left dismally bare, as it is today. Some of the images were absurd enough, some lent themselves so readily to superstition as to merit destruction; but some were sufficiently beautiful to make Zwingli’s successor, Heinrich Bullinger, mourn their loss. Zwingli himself had a tolerant attitude toward images that were not worshiped as wonder-working idols,13 but he condoned the demolition as a reproof to idolatry.14 Village churches in the canton were allowed to keep their images if a majority of the congregation so desired. Catholics retained some civic rights, but were ineligible to public office. Attendance at Mass was punishable by a fine; eating fish instead of meat on Friday was forbidden by law.15 Monasteries and nunneries (with one exception) were closed or turned into hospitals or schools; monks and nuns emerged from the cloister into marriage. Saints’ days were abolished, and pilgrimages, holy water, and Masses for the dead disappeared. Though not all these changes were consummated by 1524, yet the Reformation was by that time far more advanced in Zwingli and Zurich than in Luther and Wittenberg; Luther then was still a celibate monk, and still said Mass.
In November 1524, Zurich formed a Privy Council (Heimliche Rath) of six members to prepare settlements of urgent or delicate problems of government. Between Zwingli and this Council a working compromise took form: he surrendered to it the regulation of ecclesiastical as well as secular affairs, and in both fields it followed his lead. Church and state in Zurich became one organization, of which Zwingli was unofficial head, and in which the Bible was accepted (like the Koran in Islam) as the first source and final test of law. In Zwingli, as later in Calvin, the Old Testament ideal of the prophet guiding the state was realized.
So quickly and completely successful in Zurich, Zwingli turned an acquisitive eye upon the Catholic cantons, and wondered whether all Switzerland might not be won to the new form of the old faith.
IV. ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS
The Reformation had split the Confederation, and seemed destined to destroy it. Bern, Basel, Schaffhausen, Appenzell, and the Grisons favored Zurich; the other cantons were hostile. Five cantons—Lucerne, Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden, and Zug—formed a Catholic League to suppress all Hussite, Lutheran, and Zwinglian movements (1524). Archduke Ferdinand of Austria urged all Catholic states to united action, promised his aid, and doubtless hoped to restore the Hapsburg power in Switzerland. On July 16 all the cantons except Schaffhausen and Appenzell agreed to exclude Zurich from future federal diets. Zurich and Zwingli responded by sending missionaries into the Thorgau district to proclaim the Reformation. One of these was arrested; friends rescued him, and led a wild crowd that sacked and burned a monastery, and destroyed images in several churches (July 1524). Three of the leaders were executed, and a martial spirit rose on both sides. Erasmus, timid in Basel, was alarmed to see pious worshipers, aroused by their preachers, come out of church “like men possessed, with anger and rage painted on their faces .... like warriors animated by their general to some mighty attack.” 16 Six cantons threatened to leave the Confederation if Zurich were not chastised.
Zwingli, enjoying his new role of war leader, advised Zurich to increase its army and arsenal, to seek alliance with France, to build a fire behind Ferdinand by fomenting revolution in Tirol, and to promise Thorgau and Saint-Gall the properties of their monasteries in return for their support. To the Catholic League he offered peace on three conditions: that it yield to Zurich the famous abbey of St. Gall; that it renounce the Austrian alliance; and that it surrender to Zurich the Lucerne satirist Thomas Murner, who had written too pungently of the Reformers. The League scorned these terms. Zurich ordered its representatives in Saint-Gall to seize the abbey; they obeyed (January 28, 1529). In February the tension was raised by events in Basel.
The Protestant leader in that “Athens of Switzerland” was Johannes Hausschein, who had Hellenized his name, meaning house lamp, into Oecolampadius. He wrote Latin poetry at twelve, mastered Greek soon afterward, and rose to rank second only to Reuchlin as a Hebraist. In his pulpit at St. Martin’s Church and in his chair of theology at the university, he made a name for himself as a reformer and moralist, humane in everything but religion. By 1521 he was attacking the abuses of the confessional, the doctrine of transubstantiation, the idolatry of the Virgin. In 1523 Luther acclaimed him. In 1525 he adopted the Zwinglian program, including the prosecution of Anabaptists. But he rejected predestination; salus nostra ex Deo, he taught, perditio nostra ex nobis—” Our salvation comes from God, our damnation from ourselves.”17 When the Basel Council, now predominantly Protestant, proclaimed freedom of worship (1528), Oecolampadius protested, and demanded the suppression of the Mass.
On February 8,1529,800 men, assembled in the church of the Franciscans, sent to the Council a demand that the Mass should be forbidden, that all Catholics should be dismissed from office, and that a more democratic constitution should be put in force. The Council deliberated. On the following day the petitioners came in arms to the market place. When by noon the Council had still reached no decision, the crowd moved into the churches with hammers and axes, and destroyed all discoverable religious images.18 Erasmus described the affair in a letter to Pirkheimer:
The smiths and workmen removed the pictures from the churches, and heaped such insults upon the images of the saints and the crucifix itself, that it is quite surprising there was no miracle, seeing how many always used to occur whenever the saints were even slightly offended. Not a statue was left either in the churches, or the vestibules, or the porches, or the monasteries. The frescoes were obliterated by means of a coating of lime. Whatever would burn was thrown into the fire, and the rest was pounded into fragments. Nothing was spared for love or money.19
The Council took the hint, and voted full abolition of the Mass. Erasmus, Beatus Rhenanus, and nearly all professors in the university left Basel. Oecolampadius, triumphant, survived the outbreak by only two years, dying soon after Zwingli’s death.
In May 1529, a Protestant missionary from Zurich, attempting to preach in the city of Schwyz, was burned at the stake. Zwingli persuaded the Zurich Council to declare war. He drew up the plan of campaign, and led the canton’s troops in person. At Kappel, ten miles south of Zurich, they were stopped by one man, Landemann Aebli of Glarus, who begged an hour’s truce while he negotiated with the League. Zwingli suspected treachery, and favored immediate advance; he was overruled by his Bernese allies, and by his soldiers, who readily fraternized, across the cantonal and theological border, with the soldiers of the enemy. For sixteen days negotiations continued; finally the good sense of the Swiss prevailed, and the First Peace of Kappel was signed (June 24,1529). The terms were a victory for Zwingli: the Catholic cantons agreed to pay an indemnity to Zurich, and to end their alliance with Austria; neither party was to attack the other because of religious differences; and in the “common lands” subject to two ox more cantons the people were to decide, by a majority vote, the regulation of their religious life. Zwingli, however, was dissatisfied: he had demanded, and not received, freedom for Protestant preaching in Catholic cantons. He predicted an early rupture of the peace.
It lasted twenty-eight months. In the interim an effort was made to unite the Protestants of Switzerland and Germany. Charles V had patched up his quarrel with Clement VII; both were now free to join forces against the Protestants. But these were already a powerful political force. Half of Germany was Lutheran; many German cities—Ulm, Augsburg, Württemberg, Mainz, Frankfurt-am-Main, Strasbourg—had strong Zwinglian sympathies; and in Switzerland, though the rural districts were Catholic, most of the towns were Protestant. Obviously self-protection against the Empire and the papacy required Protestant unity. Only theology stood in the way.
Phili
p, Landgrave of Hesse, took the initiative by inviting Luther, Melanchthon, and other German Protestants to meet Zwingli, Oecolampadius, and other Swiss Protestants in his castle at Marburg, north of Frankfurt. On September 29, 1529, the rival factions met. Zwingli made generous concessions; he dispelled Luther’s suspicion that he doubted the divinity of Christ; he accepted the Nicene Creed, and the dogma of original sin. But he would not withdraw his view of the Eucharist as a symbol and commemoration rather than a miracle. Luther chalked on the conference table the words ascribed to Christ—“This is my body”—and would admit none but a literal interpretation. On fourteen articles the parties signed an agreement; on the Eucharist they parted (October 3), and not amicably. Luther refused Zwingli’s proffered hand, saying, “Your spirit is not our spirit”; he drew up a theological profession in seventeen articles, including “consubstantiation,” and persuaded the Lutheran princes to reject alliance with any group that would not sign all seventeen.20 Melanchthon agreed with his master. “We told the Zwinglians,” he wrote, “that we wondered how their consciences would allow them to call us brethren when they held that our doctrine was erroneous”;21 here in one sentence is the spirit of the age. In 1532 Luther admonished Duke Albrecht of Prussia not to allow any Zwinglian in his territory, on pain of everlasting damnation. It was too much to ask of Luther that he should pass at one step from the Middle Ages into modernity; he had received too profound an impress of medieval religion to bear patiently with any repudiation of its fundamentals; he felt, like a good Catholic, that his world of thought would collapse, the whole meaning of life would fade away, if he lost any basic element of the faith in which he had been formed. Luther was the most medieval of modern men.