The Reformation

by Will Durant

  Poor Adrian, whose good intentions outran his powers, died brokenhearted in 1523. His successor, Clement VII. continued to urge Erasmus to enter the lists against Luther. When finally the scholar yielded, it was with no personal attack on Luther, no general indictment of the Reformation, but by an objective and mannerly discussion of free will (De libero arbitrio, 1524). He admitted that he could not fathom the mystery of moral freedom, nor reconcile it with divine omniscience and omnipotence. But no humanist could accept the doctrines of predestination and determinism without sacrificing the dignity and value of man or of human life: here was another basic cleavage between the Reformation and the Renaissance. To Erasmus it seemed obvious that a God who punished sins that His creatures as made by Him could not help committing, was an immoral monster unworthy of worship or praise; and to ascribe such conduct to Christ’s “Father in heaven” would be the direst blasphemy. On Luther’s assumptions the worst criminal would be an innocent martyr, fated to sin by an act of God, and then condemned by divine vengeance to eternal suffering. How could a believer in predestination make any creative effort, or labor to improve the condition of mankind? Erasmus confessed that a man’s moral choice is fettered by a thousand circumstances over which he has had no control; yet man’s consciousness persists in affirming some measure of freedom, without which he would be a meaningless automaton. In any case, Erasmus concluded, let us admit our ignorance, our incapacity to reconcile moral freedom with divine prescience or omnipresent causality; let us postpone the solution to the Last Judgment; but meanwhile let us shun any hypothesis that makes man a puppet, and God a tyrant crueler than any in history.

  Clement VII sent Erasmus 200 florins ($5,000?) on receiving the treatise. Most Catholics were disappointed by the conciliatory and philosophical tone of the book; they had hoped for an exhilarating declaration of war. Melanchthon, who had expressed predestinarian views in his Loci communes, was favorably impressed by Erasmus’ argument, and omitted the doctrine in later editions; 99 he, too, still hoped for peace. But Luther, in a delayed response entitled De servo arbitrio (1525), defended predestination uncompromisingly:

  The human will is like a beast of burden. If God mounts it, it wishes and goes as God wills; if Satan mounts it, it wishes and goes as Satan wills. Nor can it choose its rider.... The riders contend for its possession.... God foresees, foreordains, and accomplishes all things by an unchanging, eternal, and efficacious will. By this thunderbolt free will sinks shattered in the dust.100

  It is significant of the sixteenth-century mood that Luther rejected free will not, as some eighteenth-century thinkers would do, because it ran counter to a universal reign of law and causality, nor, as many in the nineteenth century would do, because heredity, environment, and circumstance seemed to determine, like another trinity, the desires that seem to determine the will. He rejected free will on the ground that God’s omnipotence makes Him the real cause of all events and all actions, and that consequently it is He, and not our virtue or our sins, Who decides our salvation or damnation. Luther faces the bitterness of his logic manfully:

  Common sense and natural reason are highly offended that God by His mere will deserts, hardens, and damns, as if He delighted in sin and in such eternal torments, He Who is said to be of such mercy and goodness. Such a concept of God seems wicked, cruel, and intolerable, and by it many men have bee revolted in all ages. I myself was once offended to the very depth of the abyss of desperation, so that I wished that I had never been created. There is no use trying to get away from this by ingenious distinctions. Natural reason, however much it is offended, must admit the consequences of the omniscience and omnipotence of God.... If it is difficult to believe in God’s mercy and goodness when He damns those who do not deserve it, we must recall that if God’s justice could be recognized as just by human comprehension, it would not be divine.101

  Typical again of the age was the wide sale that this treatise On the Slave Will had in the seven Latin and two vernacular editions that were called for within a year. In the sequel this proved the great source book of Protestant theology; here Calvin found the doctrine of predestination, election, and reprobation which he transmitted to France, Holland, Scotland, England, and America. Erasmus answered Luther in two minor tracts, Hyperaspistes (The Defender) I and II (1526–27), but contemporary opinion gave the Reformer the better of the argument.

  Even at this stage Erasmus continued his efforts for peace. To his correspondents he recommended tolerance and courtesy. He thought that the Church should permit clerical marriage and communion in both kinds; that she should yield some of her vast properties to lay authorities and uses; and that such divisive questions as predestination, free will, and the Real Presence should be left undefined, open to diverse interpretations.102 He advised Duke George of Saxony to treat the Anabaptists humanely; “it is not just to punish with fire any error whatever, unless there be joined to it sedition or some other crime such as the laws punish with death.” 103 This was in 1524; in 1533, however, moved by friendship or senility, he defended the imprisonment of heretics by Thomas More.104 In Spain, where some humanists had become Erasmians, the monks of the Inquisition began a systematic scrutiny of Erasmus’ works, with a view to having him condemned as a heretic (1527). Nevertheless he continued his criticism of monastic immorality and theological dogmatism as main provocatives of the Reformation. In 1528 he repeated the charge that “many convents, both of men and women, are public brothels,” and “in many monasteries the last virtue to be found is chastity.” 105 In 1532 he condemned the monks as importunate beggars, seducers of women, hounders of heretics, hunters of legacies, forgers of testimonials.106 He was all for reforming the Church while deprecating the Reformation. He could not bring himself to leave the Church, or to see her torn in half. “I endure the Church till the day I shall see a better one.” 107

  He was dismayed when he heard of the sack of Rome by Protestant and Catholic troops in the service of the Emperor (1527); he had hoped that Charles would encourage Clement to compromise with Luther; now Pope and Emperor were at each other’s throats. A closer shock came when, in a pious riot, the reformers at Basel destroyed the images in the churches (1529). Only a year before, he himself had denounced the worship of images: “the people should be taught that these are no more than signs; it would be better if there were none at all, and prayer were addressed only to Christ. But in all things let there be moderation”108: this was precisely, on this point, the position of Luther. But the incensed and senseless denudation of churches seemed to him an illiberal and barbarous reaction. He left Basel and moved to Freiburg-im-Breisgau, in Catholic Austrian territory. The city authorities received him with honors, and gave him the unfinished palace of Maximilian I for a residence. When the Imperial pension came too irregularly the Fuggers sent him whatever funds he needed. But the monks and theologians of Freiburg attacked him as a secret skeptic, and as the real cause of the turmoil in Germany. In 1535 he returned to Basel. A delegation of university professors went out to welcome him, and Jerome Froben, son of Johann, gave him rooms in his home.

  He was now sixty-nine, thin, with features drawn taut with age. He suffered from ulcers, diarrhea, pancreatitis, gout, stone, and frequent colds; note the swollen hands in Dürer’s drawing. In his final year he was confined to his rooms, often to his bed. Harassed with pain, and hearing almost daily of fresh attacks made upon him by Protestants and Catholics, he lost the habitual good cheer that had endeared him to his friends, and became morose. Yet, almost daily, letters of homage came to him from kings, prelates, statesmen, scholars, or financiers, and his dwelling was a goal of literary pilgrimage. On June 6, 1536, he was stricken with acute dysentery. He knew himself to be dying, but he did not ask for a priest or confessor, and passed away (June 12) without the sacraments of the Church, repeatedly invoking the names of Mary and Christ. Basel gave him a princely funeral and a tomb in the cathedral. The humanists, the printers, and the bishop of the city joined in erecting over his remai
ns a stone slab, still in place, commemorating his “incomparable erudition in every branch of learning” His will left no legacy for religious purposes, but assigned sums for the care of the sick or the old, for providing dowries for poor girls, and for the education of promising youths.

  His standing with posterity fluctuated with the prestige of the Renaissance. Almost all parties, in the fever of religious revolution, called him a trimmer and a coward. The Reformers charged him with having led them to the brink, inspired them to jump, and then taken to his heels. At the Council of Trent he was branded as an impious heretic, and his works were forbidden to Catholic readers. As late as 1758 Horace Walpole termed him “a begging parasite, who had parts enough to discover the truth, and not courage enough to profess it.”109 Late in the nineteenth century, as the smoke of battle cleared, a learned and judicious Protestant historian mourned that the Erasmian conception of reform, “a scholar’s conception .... was soon interrupted and set aside by ruder and more drastic methods. Yet it may be questioned whether, after all, the slow way is not in the long run the surest, and whether any other agent of human progress can permanently be substituted for culture. The Reformation of the sixteenth century was Luther’s work; but if any fresh Reformation is .... coming, it can only be based on the principles of Erasmus.”110 And a Catholic historian adds an almost rationalistic appreciation: “Erasmus belonged, intellectually, to a later and more scientific and rational age. The work which he had initiated, and which was interrupted by the Reformation troubles, was resumed at a more acceptable time by the scholarship of the seventeenth century.”111 Luther had to be; but when his work was done, and passion cooled, men would try again to catch the spirit of Erasmus and the Renaissance, and renew in patience and mutual tolerance the long, slow labor of enlightenment.

  CHAPTER XX

  The Faiths at War

  1525–60

  I. THE PROTESTANT ADVANCE: 1525–30

  WHAT combination of forces and circumstances enabled nascent Protestantism to survive the hostility of both papacy and Empire? Mystical piety, Biblical studies, religious reform, intellectual development, Luther’s audacity, were not enough; they might have been diverted or controlled. Probably the economic factors were decisive: the desire to keep German wealth in Germany, to free Germany from papal or Italian domination, to transfer ecclesiastical property to secular uses, to repel Imperial encroachments upon the territorial, judicial, and financial authority of the German princes, cities, and states. Add certain political conditions that permitted the Protestant success. The Ottoman Empire, after conquering Constantinople and Egypt, was expanding dangerously in the Balkans and Africa, absorbing half of Hungary, besieging Vienna, and threatening to close the Mediterranean to Christian trade; Charles V and Archduke Ferdinand required a united Germany and Austria—Protestant as well as Catholic money and men—to resist this Moslem avalanche. The Emperor was usually engrossed in the affairs of Spain or Flanders or Italy, or in mortal conflict with Francis I of France; he had no time or funds for civil war in Germany. He agreed with his pensioner Erasmus that the Church badly needed reform; he was intermittently at odds with Clement VII and Paul III, even to allowing his army to sack Rome; only when Emperor and Pope were friends could they effectually combat the religious revolution.

  But by 1527 the Lutheran “heresy” had become orthodoxy in half of Germany. The cities found Protestantism profitable; “they do not care in the least about religion,” mourned Melanchthon; “they are only anxious to get dominion into their hands, to be free from the control of the bishops”;1 for a slight alteration in their theological garb they escaped from episcopal taxes and courts, and could appropriate pleasant parcels of ecclesiastical property.2 Yet an honest desire for a simpler and sincerer religion seems to have moved many citizens. At Magdeburg the members of St. Ulrich’s parish met in the churchyard and chose eight men who were to select the preacher and manage the affairs of the church (1524); soon all churches in the city were administering the Lord’s Supper in the Lutheran mode. Augsburg was so fervently Protestant that when Campeggio came there as papal legate the populace dubbed him Antichrist (1524). Most of Strasbourg accepted the new theology from Wolfgang Fabricius Capito (1523), and Martin Bucer, who succeeded him there, also converted Ulm. In Nuremberg great business leaders like Lazarus Spengler and Hieronymus Baumgärtner won the city council to the Lutheran creed (1526); the Sebalduskirche and the Lorenzkirche transformed their ritual accordingly, while keeping their Catholic art. In Brunswick the writings of Luther were widely circulated; his hymns were publicly sung; his version of the New Testament was so earnestly studied that when a priest misquoted it he was corrected by the congregation; finally the city council ordered all clergymen to preach only what could be found in the Scriptures, to baptize in German, and to serve the sacrament in both forms (1528). By 1530 the new faith had won Hamburg, Bremen, Rostock, Lübeck, Stralsund, Danzig, Dorpat, Riga, Reval, and almost all the Imperial cities of Swabia. Iconoclastic riots broke out in Augsburg, Hamburg, Brunswick, Stralsund. Probably some of this violence was a reaction against the ecclesiastical use of statues and paintings to inculcate ridiculous and lucrative legends.

  The princes, gladly adopting Roman law—which made the secular ruler omnipotent as delegate of the “sovereign people”—saw in Protestantism a religion that not only exalted the state but obeyed it; now they could be spiritual as well as temporal lords, and all the wealth of the Church could be theirs to administer or enjoy. John the Steadfast, who succeeded Frederick the Wise as Elector of Saxony (1525), definitely accepted the Lutheran faith, which Frederick had never done; and when John died (1532) his son John Frederick kept Electoral Saxony firmly Protestant. Philip the Magnanimous, Landgrave of Hesse, formed with John the League of Gotha and Torgau (1526) to protect and extend Lutheranism. Other princes fell in line: Ernest of Lüneburg, Otto and Francis of Brunswick-Lüneburg, Henry of Mecklenburg, Ulrich of Württemberg. Albert of Prussia, Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, following Luther’s advice, abandoned his monastic vows, married, secularized the lands of his order, and made himself Duke of Prussia (1525). Luther saw himself, apparently by the mere force of his personality and eloquence, winning half of Germany.

  Since many monks and nuns now left their convents, and the public seemed unwilling to support the remainder, the Lutheran princes suppressed all monasteries in their territory except a few whose inmates had embraced the Protestant faith. The princes agreed to share the confiscated properties and revenues with the nobles, the cities, and some universities, but this pledge was very laxly redeemed. Luther inveighed against the application of ecclesiastical wealth to any but religious or educational purposes, and condemned the precipitate seizure of church buildings and lands by the nobility. A modest part of the spoils was yielded to schools and poor relief; the princes and nobles kept the rest. “Under cover of the Gospel,” wrote Melanchthon (1530), “the princes were only intent on the plunder of the churches.” 3

  For good or evil, for spiritual or material ends, the great transformation progressed. Whole provinces—East Friesland, Silesia, Schleswig, Holstein—went over almost unanimously to Protestantism; nothing could better show how moribund Catholicism had there become. Where priests survived, they continued their support of concubines,4 and clamored for permission to marry legally as the Lutheran clergy were doing.5 Archduke Ferdinand reported to the Pope that the desire for marriage was almost universal among the Catholic secular clergy, that out of a hundred pastors scarcely one was not openly or secretly married; and Catholic princes pleaded with the papacy that the abolition of celibacy had become a moral necessity.6 A loyal Catholic complained (1524) that the bishops, with revolution on their doorsteps, went on with their Lucullan feasts;7 and a Catholic historian, speaking of Albrecht, Archbishop of Mainz, describes “the luxuriously furnished apartments which this unholy prince of the Church used for secret intercourse with his mistress.” 8 “Everybody,” says the same historian, “had become so hostile to
priests that these were mocked and annoyed wherever they went.” 9 “The people everywhere,” wrote Erasmus (January 31, 1530), “are for the new doctrines.” 10 This was true, however, only in northern Germany; and even there Duke George of Saxony and Elector Joachim of Brandenburg were resolutely Catholic. Southern and western Germany—which had been part of the ancient Roman Empire, and had received some Latin culture—remained for the most part loyal to the Church; the gemütlich South preferred the gaily colorful and sexually lenient ways of Catholicism to the predestinarian stoicism of the North. The powerful elector-archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and (till 1543) Cologne kept their regions predominantly Catholic; and Pope Adrian VI saved Bavaria by granting its dukes, for their secular uses, a fifth of ecclesiastical income in their state. A similar grant of Church revenues appeased Ferdinand in Austria.

  Hungary entered vitally into the drama. The premature accession of Louis II at the age of ten (1516), and his premature death, were formative elements in the Hungarian tragedy. Even his birth was premature; the medicos of his time barely saved the frail infant by enclosing it in the warm carcasses of animals slaughtered to give it heat. Louis grew into a handsome youth, kindly and generous, but given to extravagance and festivities on meager resources amid a corrupt and incompetent court. When Sultan Suleiman sent an ambassador to Buda the nobles refused to receive him, dragged him around the country, cut off his nose and ears, and turned him back to his master.11 The infuriated Sultan invaded Hungary, and seized two of its most vital strongholds—Szabacs and Belgrade (1521). After long delays, and amid the treason or cowardice of his nobles, Louis raised an army of 25,000 men, and marched out with mad heroism to face 100,000 Turks on a field near Mohács (August 30, 1526). The Hungarians were slaughtered almost to a man, and Louis himself was drowned in stumbling flight. Suleiman entered Buda in triumph; his army sacked and burned the handsome capital, destroyed all its major buildings except the royal palace, and gave to the flames most of Matthias Corvinus’s precious library. The victorious host spread over the eastern half of Hungary, burning and pillaging, and Suleiman drove 100,000 Christian captives before him to Constantinople.