by Will Durant
But Charles was determined to bring the campaign to a decision. Marching north, he met the depleted forces of the Elector at Mühlberg on the Meissen, routed them completely (April 24, 1547), and took John captive. Ferdinand demanded the execution of the doughty prince; canny Charles agreed to commute the sentence to life imprisonment if Wittenberg would open its gates to him; it did, and the capital of German Protestantism fell into Catholic hands while Luther slept peacefully under a slab in the Castle Church. Maurice of Saxony and Joachim of Brandenburg persuaded Philip of Hesse to surrender on their promise that he would soon be freed. Charles had made no such pledge; the extent of his geniality was to promise Philip release after fifteen years. No one seemed left to challenge the victorious Emperor. Henry VIII had died on January 28, Francis I on March 31. Never since Charlemagne had the Imperial power been so great.
But the winds of fortune veered again. German princes, assembled in another diet at Augsburg (September 1547), resisted the efforts of Charles to consolidate his military victory into a legal autocracy. Paul III accused him of conniving at the murder of Pierluigi Farnese, the Pope’s natural son; and Bavaria, ever loyal to the Church, turned against the Emperor. A Protestant majority re-formed among the princes, and wrung from Charles his temporary consent to clerical marriage, the double administration of the sacrament, and the Protestant retention of Church property (1548). The Pope fumed at the Emperor’s assumption of power to rule on such ecclesiastical matters, and Catholics murmured that Charles was more interested in extending his Empire and entrenching the Hapsburgs than in restoring the one true faith. Maurice, now Elector of Saxony at Wittenberg, found himself, Protestant and victorious, dangerously unpopular amid a population Protestant and conquered; his treachery had poisoned the power it had won. His appeals to Charles to free the Landgrave were ignored. He began to wonder had he chosen the better part. Secretly he joined the Protestant princes in the Treaty of Chambord (January 1552), by which Henry II of France promised aid in expelling Charles from Germany. While Henry invaded Lorraine and seized Metz, Toul, and Verdun, Maurice and his Protestant allies marched south with 30,000 men. Charles, resting on his laurels at Innsbruck, had carelessly disbanded his troops; he had now no defense except diplomacy, and even at that shifty game Maurice proved his match. Ferdinand proposed an armistice; Maurice prolonged the negotiations courteously, meanwhile advancing on Innsbruck. On May 9, accompanied only by a few attendants, Charles moved painfully, by litter, through rain and snow and the night, over the Brenner Pass to Villach in Carinthia. One throw of fortune’s dice had transformed the master of Europe into a gouty fugitive shivering in the Alps.
On May 26 Maurice and the triumphant Protestants met with Ferdinand and some Catholic leaders at Passau. Charles, after a long interlude of selfdeflation, consented to have Ferdinand sign a treaty (August 2, 1552) by which Philip was to be released, the Protestant armies were to disband, both Protestants and Catholics were to enjoy freedom of worship till a new diet could meet, and if that diet failed to reach an acceptable settlement, this freedom of worship should continue forever—a favorite word in treaties. Maurice had begun with treachery, and had risen to victorious statesmanship; soon (1553) he would die for his country at the age of thirty in battle against Albrecht Alcibiades, who had turned half of Germany into an anarchy perilous to all.
Charles, despairing of a solution for his problems in Germany, turned west to renew his struggle with France. Ferdinand presided with patience over the historic Diet of Augsburg (February 5-September 25, 1555), which at last, for half a century, gave Germany peace. He saw that the territorial principle of ducal freedom was too strong to allow such a central and absolute sovereignty as the kings had won in France. The Catholic representatives were a majority in the Diet, but the Protestants, superior in military power, bound themselves to stand by every article of the Augsburg Confession of 1530; the Elector Augustus, who had succeeded Maurice in Saxony, adhered to the Protestant view; and the Catholics perceived that they must yield or renew the war. Charles, in the senility of his diplomacy, urged the electors to name his son Philip as his successor to the Imperial title; even the Catholics dreaded the prospect of that dour Spaniard ruling them; and Ferdinand, aspiring to the same throne, could not hope to win without Protestant support in the electoral college.
Arms and circumstances so favored the Protestants that they demanded everything: they were to be free in the practice of their faith in all German territory; Catholic worship was to be forbidden in Lutheran territory; present and future confiscations of Church property were to be held valid and irrevocable.58 Ferdinand and Augustus worked out a compromise that in four famous words—cuius regio eius religio—embodied the spiritual infirmity of the nation and the age. In order to permit peace among and within the states each prince was to choose between Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism; all his subjects were to accept “his religion whose realm” it was; and those who did not like it were to emigrate. There was no pretense on either side to toleration; the principle which the Reformation had upheld in the youth of its rebellion—the right of private judgment—was as completely rejected by the Protestant leaders as by the Catholics. That principle had led to such a variety and clash of sects that the princes felt justified in restoring doctrinal authority, even if it had to be fractured into as many parts as there were states. The Protestants now agreed with Charles and the popes that unity of religious belief was indispensable to social order and peace; and we cannot judge them fairly unless we visualize the hatred and strife that were consuming Germany. The results were bad and good: toleration was now definitely less after the Reformation than before it;59 but the princes banished dissenters instead of burning them—a rite reserved for witches; and the resultant multiplication of infallibilities weakened them all.
The real victor was not freedom of worship but the freedom of the princes. Each became, like Henry VIII of England, the supreme head of the Church in his territory, with the exclusive right to appoint the clergy and the men who should define the obligatory faith. The “Erastian” principle—that the state should rule the Church—was definitely established.* As it was the princes, not the theologians, who had led Protestantism to its triumph, they naturally assumed the fruits of victory—their territorial supremacy over the emperor, their ecclesiastical supremacy over the Church. Protestantism was nationalism extended to religion. But the nationalism was not that of Germany; it was the patriotism of each principality; German unity was not furthered, it was hindered, by the religious revolution; but it is not certain that unity would have been a blessing. When Ferdinand was chosen emperor (1558) his Imperial powers were less than those that even the harassed and hampered Charles had possessed. In effect the Holy Roman Empire died not in 1806 but in 1555.
The German cities, like the Empire, lost in the triumph of the princes. The Imperial communes had been wards of the emperor, protected by him against domination by the territorial rulers; now that the emperor was crippled the princes were free to interfere in municipal affairs, and communal independence waned. Meanwhile the growing vigor of Holland absorbed most of the trade that poured German products into the North Sea through the mouths of the Rhine; and the southern cities languished with the relative commercial decline of Venice and the Mediterranean. Commercial and political enfeeblement brought cultural decay; not for two centuries to come would the German towns show again the vitality of trade and thought that had preceded and supported the Reformation.
Melanchthon, surviving the Peace of Augsburg by five years, was not sure that he wanted the reprieve. He had outlived his leadership, not only in negotiations with the Catholics but in the determination of Protestant theology. He had so far liberated himself from Luther as to reject complete predestination and the bodily presence of Christ in the Eucharist,60 and he struggled to maintain the importance of good works while insisting with Luther that they could not earn salvation. A bitter controversy arose between “Philippists”—Melanchthon and his followers—and
the orthodox Lutherans, who fulminated chiefly from Jena; these called Melanchthon “an apostate Mameluke” and “servant of Satan”; he described them as idolatrous sophistical blockheads.61 Professors were engaged or dismissed, imprisoned or released, as the tides of theological lava ebbed or flowed. The two parties agreed in proclaiming the right of the state to suppress heresy by force. Melanchthon followed Luther in sanctioning serfdom and upholding the divine right of kings;62 but he wished that the Lutheran movement, instead of allying itself with the princes, had sought rather the protection of municipal burgher aristocracies, as in Zurich, Strasbourg, Nuremberg, and Geneva. In his most characteristic moments he spoke like the Erasmian that he had hoped to be: “Let us speak only of the Gospel, of human weakness and divine mercy, of the organization of the Church, and the true worship. To reassure souls and give them a rule of right action—is this not the essence of Christianity? The rest is scholastic debate, sectarian disputes.”63 When death came to him he welcomed it as a benign liberation from the “fury of theologians” and the “barbarity” of “this sophistical age.” 64 History had miscast as a general in a revolutionary war a spirit that nature had made for scholarship, friendliness, and peace.
CHAPTER XXI
John Calvin
1509–64
I. YOUTH
HE was born at Noyon, France, July 10, 1509. It was an ecclesiastical city, dominated by its cathedral and its bishop; here at the outset he had an example of theocracy—the rule of a society by clergymen in the name of God. His father, Gérard Chauvin, was secretary to the bishop, proctor in the cathedral chapter, and fiscal procurator of the county. Jean’s mother died while he was still young; the father married again, and perhaps Calvin owed to stern step-rearing part of his somber spirit. Gérard destined three of his sons for the priesthood, confident that he could place them well. He found benefices for two, but one of these became a heretic and died refusing the sacraments. Gérard himself was excommunicated after a financial dispute with the cathedral chapter, and had some trouble getting buried in holy ground.
Jean was sent to the Collège de la Marche at the University of Paris. He registered as Johannes Calvinus, and learned to write excellent Latin. He passed later to the Collège de Montaigu, where he must have heard echoes of its famous pupil Erasmus; and he remained there till 1528, when his Catholic counterpart, Ignatius Loyola, entered. “The stories told at one time of Calvin’s ill-regulated youth,” says a Catholic authority, “have no foundation.” 1 On the contrary, the available evidence indicates an assiduous student, shy, taciturn, pious, and already “a severe censor of his comrades’ morals”;2 yet loved by his friends, now as later, with an unshakable fidelity. In the hot pursuit of esoteric knowledge or fascinating theory he read far into the night; even in those student years he developed some of the many ailments that plagued his mature life and helped to form his mood.
Unexpectedly, late in 1528, a directive came from his father to go to Orléans and study law, presumably, said the son, “because he judged that the science of laws commonly enriched those who followed it.”3 Calvin took readily enough to the new study; law, not philosophy or literature, seemed to him the outstanding intellectual achievement of mankind, the molding of man’s anarchic impulses to order and peace. He carried into theology and ethics the logic, precision, and severity of Justinian’s Institutes, and gave his own masterpiece a similar name. He became above all a lawgiver, the Numa and Lycurgus of Geneva.
Having taken his degree as Licentiate or Bachelor of Laws (1531), he returned to Paris and entered upon a voracious study of classical literature. Feeling the common urge to see himself in print, he published (1532) a Latin essay on Seneca’s De dementia; the sternest of religious legislators began his public career with a salute to mercy. He sent a copy to Erasmus, hailing him as the “second glory” (after Cicero) and “first delight of letters.” He seemed dedicated to humanism when some sermons of Luther reached him and stirred him with their audacity. Alert circles in Paris were discussing the new movement, and there must have been much talk about the reckless monk who had burned the bull of a pope and defied the ban of an emperor; indeed, Protestantism had already had martyrs in France. Some men who were urging Church reform were among Calvin’s friends; one of them, Gérard Roussel, was a favorite of the King’s sister, Marguerite of Navarre; another, Nicholas Cop, was chosen rector of the university, and Calvin probably had a hand in preparing Cop’s fateful inaugural address (November 1, 1533). It began with an Erasmian plea for a purified Christianity, proceeded to a Lutheran theory of salvation through faith and grace, and ended with an appeal for a tolerant hearing of the new religious ideas. The speech created a furore; the Sorbonne erupted in anger; the Parlement began proceedings against Cop for heresy. He fled; a reward of 300 crowns was offered for his capture alive or dead, but he managed to reach Basel, which was now Protestant.
Calvin was warned by friends that he and Roussel were scheduled for arrest. Marguerite seems to have interceded for him. He left Paris (January 1534) and found refuge in Angoulême; and there, probably in the rich library of Louis de Tillet, he began to write his Institutes. In May he ventured back to Noyon, and surrendered the benefices whose income had been supporting him. He was arrested there, was freed, was rearrested and again freed. He returned clandestinely to Paris, talked with Protestant leaders, and met Servetus, whom he was to burn. When some Protestant extremists posted abusive placards at various points in Paris, Francis I retaliated with a furious persecution. Calvin fled just in time (December 1534), and joined Cop in Basel. There, a lad of twenty-six, he completed the most eloquent, fervent, lucid, logical, influential, and terrible work in all the literature of the religious revolution.
II. THE THEOLOGIAN
He published the book in Latin (1536) as Christianae religionis institutio (The Principles of the Christian Religion). Within a year the issue was sold out and a new edition was invited. Calvin responded with a much enlarged version (1539), again in Latin; in 1541 he translated this into French; and this form of the work is one of the most impressive productions in the gamut of French prose. The Parlement of Paris proscribed the book in both languages, and copies of it were publicly burned in the capital. Calvin continued throughout his life to expand and republish it; in its final form it ran to 1,118 pages.
Fig. 37—SANCHEZ COELLO: Ignatius Loyola
Fig. 38—Cathedral, Segovia
Fig. 39—SULTAN MUHAMMAD NUR: Khusrau Sees Shirin Bathing. From Basil Gray, Persian Painting (Courtesy Oxford University Press)
Fig. 40—BIHZAD: The Herdsman and King Dara. From Basil Gray, Persian Painting (Courtesy Oxford University Press)
Fig. 41—ISLAMIC CALLIGRAPHY (about 1460). De Motte Collection
Fig. 42—PERSIAN BOOK COVER (about 1560)
Fig. 43—CORONATION CARPET (used for the coronation of Edward VII in 1901). Los Angeles County Museum
Fig. 44—Tomb of Hafiz, Shiraz, Persia
Fig. 45—Blue Mosque (Sultan Ahmet Mosque), Constantinople
Fig. 46—Mosque of Suleiman, Constantinople
Fig. 47—Shrine of Imam Riza, Mashhad
Fig. 48—GENTILE BELLINI: Medallion of Mohammed II. National Gallery, London
The first edition opened with a passionate but dignified “Preface to the Most Christian King of France.” Two events gave occasion for addressing Francis: the royal edict of January 1535 against the French Protestants, and the almost simultaneous invitation of Francis to Melanchthon and Bucer to come to France and arrange an alliance between the French monarch and the Lutheran princes against Charles V. Calvin hoped to reinforce political expediency with theological arguments, and help incline the King, like his sister, toward the Protestant cause. He was anxious to dissociate this from the Anabaptist movement then verging on communism in Münster. He described the French reformers as patriots, devoted to the King and averse from all economic or political disturbance. The beginning and end of this famous Preface reveal the majesty of Calvin’s
thought and style.
When I began this work, Sire, nothing was further from my thoughts than writing a book which would afterwards be presented to your Majesty. My intention was only to lay down some elementary principles, by which inquirers on the subject of religion might be instructed in the nature of true piety.... But when I perceived that the fury of certain wicked men in your kingdom had grown to such a height as to leave no room in the land for sound doctrine, I thought I should be usefully employed if in the same work... I exhibited my confession to you, that you may know the nature of that doctrine which is the object of such unbounded rage in those madmen who are now disturbing the country with fire and sword. For I shall not be afraid to acknowledge that this treatise contains a summary of that very doctrine, which, according to their clamors, deserves to be punished with imprisonment, banishment, proscription, and flames, and to be exterminated from the face of the earth. I well know with what atrocious insinuations your ears have been filled by them, in order to render our cause most odious in your esteem; but your clemency should lead you to consider that if accusation be accounted sufficient evidence of guilt, there will be an end to all innocence in words and actions.....