Ideas

by Peter Watson

  The tipping point came in 1476, when Pope Sixtus IV declared that indulgences also applied ‘to souls suffering in purgatory’. This ‘celestial confidence trick’, as William Manchester terms it, was an immediate success: peasants would starve their families and themselves to buy relief for dead relatives.4 Among those who took cynical advantage of this situation was Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar who evolved his own peripatetic circus act. ‘[He] travelled from village to village with a brass-bound chest, a bag of printed receipts, and an enormous cross draped with a papal banner. His entrance into town was accompanied by the ringing of church bells…Setting up in the nave of the local church, Tetzel would begin his pitch by calling out, “I have here the passports…to lead the human soul to the celestial joys of paradise.” The fees were dirt-cheap, he insisted, especially when one considered the alternative. He appealed to the conscience of those listening to atone for their dead relatives who had gone to their graves unshriven: “As soon as the coin rings in the bowl, the soul for whom it is paid will fly out of purgatory and straight to heaven”.’5 At his very worst, Tetzel wrote letters which promised to the credulous that the sins a person was intending to commit would be forgiven.

  He went too far. Traditionally, Tetzel’s flamboyance and exaggerated claims are held to have attracted the attention of a priest who was also a professor of philosophy at Wittenberg, north of Leipzig in Germany–Martin Luther. Recently, however, Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of the history of the church at Oxford, has drawn attention to several other developments in Catholicism which set the stage for Luther. For example, in the early sixteenth century there was already a difference between north and south Europe in the types of sermon preached in churches–in the north the preacher threw the spotlight on the congregation (the penitents) themselves, whereas in the south the sermons paid more attention to the priest and his role as a mediator in the absolution of sin.6 There was much less dissatisfaction with the status of priests in Italy than further north and this seems to have had something to do with the role of guilds.7 In and around Switzerland Landeskirchen were emerging, locally-run churches where the magistrate of the area, rather than the priest, played a leading role in teaching doctrine,8 and there was a big increase in the number of Bibles available, which helped more and more people interiorise their faith.9 The king of France called a council of cardinals in Pisa in 1511, to discuss church reform,10 while in 1512 certain works of Origen became available in Latin, which suggested that there had been no Fall, as traditionally understood, and that everyone, including the devil himself, would be saved and return to Paradise.11 On this reading, change was in the air.

  Nevertheless, it was Luther who sparked that change. He was ‘stocky, lusty’, the son of a mine owner. At university he had hoped to become a lawyer but in 1505, during a storm, he underwent a mystical experience and came to believe ‘that God was in everything’.12 It was a fundamental change. Until then, he had been part of the humanist fraternity, a disciple and colleague of Erasmus and had translated several classics. After his conversion-experience, however, he turned in on himself, shunned the company of the humanists and became obsessed with inner piety. In 1510–the peak of the Renaissance, when Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael were all thriving–he visited Rome. It shocked him. True, he adored the masterpieces of painting and sculpture and the great religious monuments, but he ‘shuddered’ at the behaviour of the priests and cardinals, in particular their cynical approach to the liturgy which, he felt, was the basis of their privilege.13

  Back in Wittenberg by 1512, he led a quiet life there for a number of years. He had been profoundly shocked by his experiences in Rome and he turned away even more from the worldliness of the humanists, as much as from the corrupt cynicism, as he saw it, of the Catholic hierarchy. Instead, he returned to the scriptures themselves, in particular the Church Fathers, and above all St Augustine. He continued to observe the world around him with dismay and, as Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish say, he was perhaps at this time ‘incubating both his views and his courage’. By 1517, however, he could no longer hold himself in and on 31 October, the eve of All Saints’ Day, he made his move. In an action which would reverberate around the world, he nailed to the door of Wittenberg church ninety-five theses attacking the sale of indulgences, and daring any one at all to come forward and argue with him.14 ‘I, Martin Luther, Doctor, of the Order of Monks at Wittenberg, desire to testify publicly that certain propositions against pontifical indulgences, as they call them, have been put forth by me…’

  Luther’s attack was directed not just at Tetzel, or the Vatican behind him. It was directed at the theology represented by indulgences. Indulgences existed, so the theory went, because of the ‘surplus grace’ that existed in the world. Jesus, and the saints who came after him, did so much good that there was a surplus of grace on earth. Purchase of an indulgence put the purchaser ‘in touch with’ this surplus. Luther didn’t like the idea that grace could be traded like potatoes in the first place but, no less important, it obscured the important fact that purchase of an indulgence freed the buyer from penance for a sin, but not from the sin itself. For Luther, the sale of indulgences was therefore deeply misleading and untheological. It was not far from this point of view to Luther’s second innovation, a return to the twelfth-century idea that ‘true inward penitence’, contrition, was needed for the proper remission of sins. The popes might claim plenary remission of all penalties but Luther insisted that contrition was a necessary condition. This next step was equally short but much more momentous. If, without contrition, an indulgence was invalid, then it soon became clear to Luther that contrition alone, ‘without any papal paraphernalia’, was itself sufficient. In making salvation dependent on an individual’s faith and contrition only, Luther simply removed the need for the sacraments and for a hierarchy to administer them.15 The idea of intercession–the very basis of the Catholic church–went out of the window.

  These, then, were the simple theological ideas that formed the basis of the Reformation, what Diarmaid MacCulloch has called ‘an accidental revolution’.16 But there was another side to what subsequently happened, a political dimension.17 Many of the humanists supported Luther when he denounced the abuses of the church. People like Erasmus shared his concern to reintroduce piety and Christian virtue back into worship rather than rely on dogma and scholastic hair-splitting. But these supporters drew back when they saw that Luther was attacking the very basis of the church itself, burning his books of canon law and papal edicts.18 And this is where a nationalistic element emerged, which also had profound consequences. Most of the humanists who refused to follow Luther all the way were non-Germans.

  In his theses and other writings, Luther didn’t hold back: he made it plain that he saw the pope as little better than a thief and a murderer. He wanted German clerics to reject their allegiance to Rome, and he wanted a national church established, with the archbishop of Mainz at its head. Once he had gained the courage to speak out, Luther’s imagination stretched into other areas that no one had dared enter before. For example, he insisted that marriage was not a sacrament, that a wife married to an impotent man might take other lovers until she conceived, and that it would not be improper to pass off this bastard as her husband’s. He said he thought bigamy ‘more sensible’ than divorce.19 He ranked different parts of the Bible in importance and in his edition of 1534 he separated out those sections that he was suspicious of, such as 2 Maccabees, into the ‘Apocrypha’.20

  One can imagine how Erasmus, not to mention the Vatican, took such arguments. But Luther was not completely alone, not by any means. There was, after all, a long history of antipathy between Germany and the papacy, going all the way back to the Investiture Struggle, and even to the barbarians. In 1508, even before Luther went to Rome, the German Diet had voted to prevent papal revenues raised by indulgences leaving Germany. In 1518, the Diet of Augsburg resolved that the ‘real enemy’ of Christendom was not then the Turks but what they called t
he ‘hound of hell’ in Rome.21 In theory, the leader of the Germans should have been the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. But he had his own ambitions and looked to Spain, newly rich throught he discovery of America. Here mained therefore a Catholic, who ‘took Rome as his anchor’. All this only helped Luther. But he found that, much as his criticisms applied to the church throughout Christendom, it was easier to effect reform in his own country: ‘He turned from reforming a world church into building a German one.’22 This became clear in his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520), in which headopteda tonelittle short of revolutionary, denied the belief that the clergy formed a ‘separate spiritual estate’ and urged German nobles to appropriate the lands of unreformed churchmen. There was no shortage of knights and princes ready to profit in this way, and so what had begun as a religious reform was soon merged with a wider struggle for political and economic supremacy seen in a national context.23

  In the course of this ‘nationalisation’ of Protestantism, however, the first hints of its own form of corruption began to appear. In its original guise Lutheranism maintained that, in order to be free, one should never act, or be forced to act, against one’s conscience. That was the true course of total honesty and was the intellectual backbone of the time, not just of Protestantism but of humanism and of the scientific revolution, then getting under way. But Luther changed. In an alarmingly small number of years he came to accept–and even to justify–the use of the sword (‘civil force’) in support of the faith.24 He brought this on himself in a way, since he was forced into this new stance by three sets of overlapping events: the Knights’ War, the Peasants’ Revolt, and the Anabaptists.

  The first of these events, the Knights’ War, flared up as a direct result of Luther’s own exhortation that the lands belonging to the church be confiscated. But this war, which broke out in 1522, failed, though it did succeed in making the political situation in Germany very tense. Three years later, in 1525, the German peasants, pressured beyond endurance by the nobles (who were starting to feel the pinch of inflation, stimulated by the arrival of American silver), and fortified by their understanding of Luther’s doctrine that the word of God had revealed that all men are equal, rose in a rebellion of their own. Here, however, and unfortunately, the leadership of the rebellion was taken over by the Anabaptists. Taking their name from their opposition to infant baptism, on the grounds that infants were too young to have faith, and that without faith the sacrament was invalid, the importance and relevance of the Anabaptists lay in their total rejection of the papal hierarchy, which was replaced for them by a devout reliance on the word of God, as revealed in the scriptures. In fact, many Anabaptists were a good deal more extreme, believing that they themselves were directly in touch with the Holy Spirit and so had no need of the scriptures. For them, the return of Christ was once again imminent and the apocalyptic ‘purification’ of the world was at hand. The twentieth-century sociologist Karl Mannheim has argued that this alliance of ‘chiliasm’–a belief in Christ’s imminent return–together with the rebellion of the peasants, marked a decisive turning-point in modern history. His argument was that it introduced the era of social revolution. ‘It is at this point that politics in the modern sense of the term begins, if we here understand by politics a more or less conscious participation of all strata of society in the achievement of some mundane purpose, as contrasted with a fatalistic acceptance of events as they are, or of control from “above”.’25

  Whether or not Mannheim was right, it needs emphasising that this reaction was not Luther’s aim (the accidental revolution again). In fact, he supported the princes against the peasants. His view was that faith and politics should not be mixed and that it was the duty of Christians to obey legitimate authority. Specifically, for him, the church was subservient to the state. ‘For Germany, the result of Luther’s thought was a division between the inner life of the spirit, which was free, and the outer life of the person, which was subjugated to unattackable authority. This dualism in German thought has lingered from Luther’s day to this.’26

  The truth is, there was something in Luther’s character that didn’t add up. Part of him favoured authority but overall, it has to be said, Lutheranism destroyed authority, certainly so far as organised religion was concerned. In freeing men from religious authority, Protestantism set men free in other ways as well. The discovery of America, and the scientific revolution, both occurring simultaneously with Protestantism, were the perfect arenas where men who rejected authority, who could let their individuality shine through, would benefit. Luther himself was not over-fond of the growing economic individualism he saw around him–it didn’t always sit well with the piety he valued. But it was ultimately unreasonable of him to expect religious individualism without all the other forms he had helped set loose.27

  Very different from Luther was John Calvin. Born a generation later in 1509, he came from a bourgeois family in Noyon, Picardy, his given name being Jean Chauviner or Caulvin. He was intended for the church but abandoned theology for the law. His father sent him to Paris, where he studied at the Collège de Montaigu, where Erasmus and Rabelais also studied theology.28 Dark haired, pale skinned, with a ‘keen’ temper, Calvin later had a ‘sudden conversion’ to Protestantism but in a sense he had been primed: his father had died ‘excommunicate’ and Calvin faced a ‘sea of troubles’ in obtaining a Christian burial for him. This embittered him against the Catholic church.

  Turning his back on Rome after his conversion, Calvin also left France and, to begin with, when he was still not thirty, composed the first sketch of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, ‘the most significant and lucid text of the Reformation’. Whereas Luther’s writings had been emotional tirades, out-pourings of his pent-up inner feelings, Calvin began to set down a system of tightly reasoned, logically formulated morals, policy and dogma. A book that began as six chapters had, by the late 1550s, grown to eighty.29 ‘The core of this dogma was that man was a helpless being before an omnipotent God.’ Calvin took Luther’s arguments to their logical–even fanatical–conclusion. Man, he said, could do nothing to alter his fate: he was either born saved or predestined for hell. On the face of it this was hardly an optimistic doctrine but, under Calvin’s system, no one ever quite knew whether they were saved or not. He said that, by and large, the ‘elect’–his word for saved–would show it by their ‘exemplary’ behaviour on earth. But you could never be sure. It was, in some ways, a form of religious terror.

  As it happened, Geneva had just turned on its Catholic bishop and the chaos that followed played into Calvin’s hand and his view that the state should be subordinate to the church, that obedience to God came before obedience to the state (it was a replay, in different clothes, of the Investiture Struggle). With anti-Catholic feeling at fever-pitch in Geneva, with religious images being broken up, Calvin–as the distinguished author of the Institutes–was invited there to help organise it as a city on the biblical mode1.30 On his arrival he was made a ‘Reader in Holy Scriptures’ and, strictly speaking, was never anything more than a pastor. But that is like saying that Nero was never anything more than a violinist. Calvin accepted the invitation only on condition that the Genevois adopt his terms–terms embodied in yet more regulations that he had drawn up, the Ordonnances ecclésiastiques and the Ordonnances sur le régime du peuple. From then on, the people of Geneva lived according to Calvin. Pastors visited each household once a year to ensure people remained true to the faith. Anyone who objected was forced to leave, jailed or in the worst circumstances executed.31

  The essence of Calvinism was that morality was enforced and enforced strictly, while Protestant doctrine was developed at the University of Geneva, which Calvin founded.32 And he set up two main arms of government, the Ministry and the Consistory. The main aim of the Ministry was to produce what might be called an ‘army’ of preachers who had to follow a particular programme and way of life and set an example. It was the job of the Consistory to gover
n morals. It comprised a court of eighteen–six ministers and twelve elders–and had the power of excommunication. It was this court, which met every Thursday, that was responsible for the dictatorship of terror in Geneva, what Daniel Boorstin calls the reign of biblical morality. It was in Geneva that a certain way of life–one that would become very familiar–was instigated: getting up early, hard work, being always concerned to set a good example (for example reading only uplifting literature). Thrift and abstinence were all-important virtues. As one historian put it, ‘This was an attempt to create a new man…the church was not simply an institution for the worship of God, but an agency for the making of men fit to worship Him.’33 The regime gave its name to the ‘Puritan’ movement.34