Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  In his very first sermon, delivered on January 1, 1519, Zwingli showed his independence. Rather than preach from the text prescribed by the Church, he decided to start at the beginning with the Gospel of Matthew; rather than dilate on Scholastic propositions, he described the life of Christ and the lessons it offered to ordinary Christians. He also stressed the need to hear the pure, unadulterated Word of God and to lead a simplified life of repentance, faith, and love based on it. Many came to listen and were moved.

  Over the next three years, however, Zwingli would undergo a dramatic change. The precipitating event was a devastating outbreak of the plague in August 1519. Among the 1,500 people carried off was Zwingli’s brother, Andreas. Most of those who could leave the city did, but Zwingli stayed on to perform his pastoral duties, and he became so ill that he nearly died. While convalescing, he wrote a poem, “The Song of Pestilence,” that captured his troubled emotional state:

  Help, Lord God, help

  in this trouble!

  I think Death is at the door.

  Stand before me, Christ;

  For thou hast overcome him! . . .

  Do what thou wilt;

  I am completely thine;

  Thy vessel I am.

  In the face of death, Erasmian-style exhortations to virtue seemed unavailing; seeking spiritual transformation, Zwingli found redemption in the reborn Christ.

  Around this same time, Zwingli began reading Luther. With increasing frequency, the Augustinian friar’s name appeared in his correspondence. He also arranged for colporteurs to carry Luther’s tracts to cities, villages, and churches across Switzerland. Later, after bitterly falling out with the German reformer, Zwingli would insist that he had arrived at his views completely independently of him—that he had read Augustine and Paul on his own and through them had developed a radical pessimism about man’s ability to attain redemption apart from God’s grace. But the themes he now began to expound—the depravity of humankind, the inutility of works, the importance of faith, the authority of Scripture—so closely resembled Luther’s as to invite skepticism about that claim. Whatever his actual pathway, Zwingli joined the ranks of Erasmians moving toward an insistently faith-based creed.

  Assuming the mantle of a prophet, Zwingli from the pulpit inveighed against superstition, ceremony, and clerical corruption. Though some of the canons at the Grossmünster objected, most were inspired by his ardor, and when a vacancy among them opened, Zwingli was named to fill it. This was in late April 1521, after Luther had made his bold stand at Worms. Electrified by the news, crowds packed the cathedral to hear Zwingli extol faith and grace, deride ostentatious displays of devotion, and call on the pious to take Christ into their hearts.

  Then, at the start of Lent in 1522, the sausages were eaten at Froschauer’s house. An investigation was launched, and the maid admitted that she had prepared the meal at her master’s bidding. No arrests were made, but Zwingli decided to draft a pamphlet explaining his views. Titled On the Choice and Freedom of Food, it condemned the laws on fasting. The ordinances demanding abstention from milk, butter, cheese, and eggs were of relatively recent origin, he wrote; if it was sinful to consume these products on fast days, why had it taken the Church fourteen centuries to discover this? Christ’s principle that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath should be applied to fasting as well. “In a word, if you will fast, do so; if you do not wish to eat meat, eat it not; but leave Christians a free choice in the matter.”

  Bishop Hugo of Constance, whose diocese included Zurich, made clear that he would tolerate no such choice, and the town council admonished all citizens to abstain from eating meat on fast days without good cause or permission until the issue could be resolved. No one, it stated, “should become involved in quarrel and strife or employ offensive and inept words against one another concerning the eating of meat, preaching, or similar matters.” Everyone, it said, should “be peaceful and calm.”

  Zurich was anything but, however. The sausage incident would be for Switzerland what Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses were for Germany—the trigger for revolt against Rome. Zurich’s example quickly spread to other cities—Basel included. On April 13, 1522 (Palm Sunday), several junior clergymen met for dinner at the Klybeck castle, a merchant’s residence. A suckling pig was served along with much oratory attesting to the historic nature of the occasion. When word of this Lenten violation spread, there was an “astonishing uproar,” as Erasmus wrote, and both the town council and the bishop of Basel (Christoph von Utenheim) issued mandates against all such violations of custom and law.

  Summoned before the bishop, the organizers of the event defended themselves in part by citing Erasmus’s example. Because of his poor digestion and loathing of fish, Erasmus had sometimes eaten chicken during Lent. But he had always been discreet about it, and he had had a papal dispensation for straying. As much as he detested the proliferation of ecclesiastical ordinances, especially about food, Erasmus was dead set against any public flouting of them. He wanted change, but only if it was orderly and authorized by the Church.

  It was to be neither. Though the bishop (who was reform-minded) decided not to punish the defiant diners, the host, a doctor named Sigismund Steinschneider, thought it prudent to leave Basel. At the parish church of St. Alban’s, Wilhelm Reublin, a university-trained theologian and priest (and future Anabaptist leader) who had also participated, was attracting up to four thousand people with sermons attacking vigils, Masses for the dead, and the bishop of Basel himself.

  Intent on clarifying his position, Erasmus drafted a long open letter to the bishop. De Esu Carnium (“On Eating Meat”), as it was titled, dealt not only with the dietary laws but also with saints’ days and priestly celibacy and the whole teeming catalog of ecclesiastical regulations. Written on the eve of the Reformation, it offered Erasmus’s fullest statement on the best way forward.

  On matters of food, he wrote, the New Testament was clear. Christ taught that each was free to eat what he wished, and Paul said that he did not want anyone to be judged on matters of food and drink. Why, then, should eating pork on Fridays be considered as grave an offense as parricide? As for the holy days on which work is prohibited, the New Testament stipulates none of them, so why had they been allowed to proliferate? While each saint must have his day, must men refrain from working on it? Should a farmer let his crop rot rather than take advantage of a good harvest day because it is dedicated to some saint? Surely it would be better to let a man work and support his family.

  Similarly, priestly celibacy had not been instituted by Christ but was of fairly recent origin. Long ago, Erasmus observed, the Church abolished nightly vigils at the shrines of the martyrs, even though this had been a custom for centuries. The hours for fasting, which used to extend to noon, had been significantly shortened. Why, then, in the case of priestly celibacy, should the Church cling so tightly to human regulation when there were so many persuasive reasons to change it? Since so few priests were actually chaste, it would be better to allow them to marry and provide their children with a liberal education. In thus arguing, Erasmus noted, he did not intend to defend those priests who had recently married without papal authorization. (In fact, he strongly opposed them.) Rather, he wanted the Church to consider the advantage that would result from adapting an old institution to present usefulness. The people were not there for the bishops—the bishops were there to minister to the people.

  Erasmus, in short, was making the case for gradual reform from the top. What was most needed, he believed, was enlightened leadership by the Church. But what if such leadership was not forthcoming? Erasmus did not say. De Esu Carnium was nonetheless a great success, appearing in eight editions in 1522 and 1523. It was also much criticized; Erasmus would later call it one of his three most disliked works, along with the Praise of Folly and the Colloquies. The Catholics hated it because of Erasmus’s blithe dismissal of customs and regulations that were an essential part of Church tradition. The reformers revil
ed it because they took Erasmus’s call for caution as a rebuke to their own headlong push for change.

  The whole climate in Basel was rapidly changing. The strife set off by the pork-eating incident at Klybeck castle was now seeping into every corner of civic life. Preachers dueled in the pulpits, and laymen contended over whether to fast or not. Erasmus had come to this broad-minded city to escape the turmoil in Louvain, but with the Reformation now gaining a foothold there and agitation rising on all sides, he began to wonder how long he would be able to remain.

  30

  Satan Falls upon the Flock

  On December 4, 1521, Luther rode into a very tense Wittenberg. On the previous morning, a gang of students and townsmen with knives hidden under their coats had gathered at the town church and prevented some priests from entering. Other priests had managed to get in, but when they began celebrating Mass, the agitators snatched their missals and drove them from the altar. They also threw stones at some parishioners who were chanting the Magnificat. The next day, a group of students smashed the door of the Franciscan friary and disrupted the services with hoots and heckling. The town council had to deploy a guard to protect the cloister, and Frederick the Wise angrily demanded that the perpetrators be detained and a full investigation carried out.

  On arriving, Luther went straight to the home of his friend Nikolaus von Amsdorf, where Philipp Melanchthon was also staying. Seeing this strange Junker with a flowing beard, red beret, and sword at his side, they wondered who it could be. Upon recognizing him, they were shocked and delighted. Luther wanted to go to the Augustinian cloister but was advised not to, so as not to give away his presence. “Everything . . . pleases me very much,” he informed Spalatin on December 5. Surprisingly, he made no mention of the recent disorders. Apparently, he considered them insignificant when measured against the great strides the reform was making.

  He was, however, upset to find that no one knew anything about his manuscripts. “There is nothing that would disturb me more at this moment,” he wrote to Spalatin, than to know that the manuscripts had reached him “and you were holding them back, since I have dealt in these little books with themes that require the greatest possible haste.” In fact, Spalatin was worried about the violence of Luther’s language and so had withheld them from the printers. In the face of Luther’s fury, however, he quickly capitulated and sent off the tracts on the Mass and monastic vows. He continued to hold back the pamphlet against Albrecht’s relics, however, worried about the damage it could do to the elector’s relations with the archbishop. At Luther’s insistence, though, Spalatin agreed to post his letter to Albrecht, in which he demanded that he take down the “idol” at Halle.

  While in Wittenberg, Luther had time to sit for a portrait by Lucas Cranach—the one surviving image of him as Junker Jörg. It’s easy to see why his friends failed to recognize him. With his filled-out face and full head of hair, Luther looked nothing like the gaunt friar they had seen leave Wittenberg for Worms eight months earlier. The one constant was his eyes: dark and intense, they gazed off into the distance, as if fixed on matters far beyond the earthly realm.

  There was, however, one practical matter that absorbed Luther’s attention during his stay. Melanchthon and other friends pressed him to take on a project that they considered of the utmost importance: a translation of the Bible into German. For the gospel to spread, they said, there was needed a text that spoke to the people in their own tongue, and Luther seemed the ideal person to provide it.

  Not that there was any lack of German Bibles. Prior to 1521, some eighteen editions had appeared. Most, though, were ornate and expensive. The best-known was a 1475 edition printed in Augsburg, but it (like most others) had been translated from the Vulgate and reproduced its formal, legalistic language. None of the existing translations had taken full advantage of the wondrous new editing tools that had recently been developed to help repair and restore ancient texts.

  The Church, for its part, strongly discouraged the production of vernacular Bibles, insisting on the Vulgate as the sole authorized text. But a new era of vernacular translations was dawning, as proclaimed by Erasmus in his Paraclesis, where he had called for the Gospels and Epistles to be “translated into all languages” so that the farmer could sing a portion of them at the plow and the weaver hum parts of them at his shuttle. Around this time, Luther, in a clear echo of Erasmus, wrote, “I wish every town would have its interpreter, and that this book alone, in all languages, would live in the hands, eyes, ears, and hearts of all people.”

  During the early part of his stay at the Wartburg, Luther had tried translating some passages from the New Testament into German and been pleased with the results. Given his insistence on Scripture as the sole Christian authority, a reliable version of the Bible seemed essential, and so he agreed that, once back in the Wartburg, he would attempt a full translation.

  With rumors spreading of his presence in Wittenberg, Luther decided after just a few days to leave. On his trip back to the Wartburg, he saw many signs of unrest in the countryside. Priests were marrying, monks were throwing off their cowls, and itinerant preachers were inveighing against the privileges of the hierarchy and the transgressions of the clergy. Roused by such statements, the common man was stirring. Among the inciting pamphlets Luther saw was one titled Karsthans, which depicted the simple farmer as an upright Christian ready to use a flail or cudgel against the pope. Already, in Erfurt, the homes of some clergymen had been attacked after it was announced that three canons who had participated in the reception for Luther during his trip to Worms were to be excommunicated. There was even talk of murdering priests.

  In the aftermath of Worms, Luther had been heartened by the arousal of the populace, but now, after seeing the explosive forces gathering, he decided to issue a warning. A Sincere Admonition to All Christians to Guard Against Insurrection and Rebellion, written shortly after his return to the Wartburg, was Luther’s first full statement on the subject of political action, and it gave an early sign of the political conservative lurking within the religious rebel. Though he was pleased to see the papists cowering before the wrath of the people, Luther wrote, “no insurrection is ever right, no matter how right the cause it seeks to promote,” for an insurrection “always results in more damage than improvement” and harms the innocent more than the guilty. When Herr Omnes (“Mr. Everyman”) breaks loose, “he cannot tell the wicked from the upright,” making injustice inevitable. Only the princes and other ruling parties should have the authority to wield the sword to set things right. “I am and always will be on the side of those against whom insurrection is directed, no matter how unjust their cause,” Luther flatly declared. “I am opposed to those who rise in insurrection, no matter how just their cause, because there can be no insurrection without hurting the innocent and shedding their blood.”

  This was not to rule out all efforts aimed at bringing about change. Through writing and speaking, Luther observed, the people could spread word of the malevolence and deceit of the pope and his agents. Using violence against the pontiff would only strengthen him; exposing him to the light of truth would surely weaken him. Luther pointed to his own work as a model: “Have I not, with the mouth alone, without a single stroke of the sword, done more harm to the pope, bishops, priests, and monks than all the emperors, kings, and princes with all their power ever did before?” People should likewise get busy and teach, write, and preach that man-made laws are empty, that no one should enter the priesthood or a monastery, and that no money should be given for bulls, candles, or churches. If this were done, in two years’ time the pope and bishops and “all the swarming vermin of the papal regime” would “vanish like smoke.” Of his followers, Luther asked only one thing—that they not use his name; “let them call themselves Christian, not Lutherans.”

  By that point, the word lutherisch, used as both an adjective and the label of a movement, was in wide circulation. Luther’s objections to it reflected more than modesty; he worried that a
ny violent acts carried out in his name would discredit him and his followers. Better to use the pamphlet and the sermon than the flail or the hoe. In a striking demonstration of the power of his own word, Luther received a personal note from Albrecht of Mainz in which he agreed to take down his relics display. “My dear doctor,” the archbishop abjectly wrote, “I have received your letter and will see to it that the thing that so moves you be done away, and I will act, God willing, as becomes a pious, spiritual, and Christian prince.” Unarmed, isolated, and hidden from the world, Luther had with his pen alone subdued German’s top prelate. Few of those stirred by his writings, however, had pens.

  After sending the Admonition off to the printers, Luther threw himself into what would be the most enduring product of his stay in the Wartburg and one of the greatest feats of his entire career: translating the Bible into German. Luther decided to begin not with the Old Testament, which posed too many challenges, but with the shorter and more manageable New. Even there, though, the obstacles were formidable. “I shall translate the Bible, although I have here shouldered a burden beyond my power,” he wrote to Amsdorf. “Now I realize what it means to translate, and why no one has previously undertaken it who would disclose his name.” (Most of the previous German translations had appeared anonymously.)