As the delegates in November 1522 began arriving in Nuremberg for the opening of the diet, then, songs about the new gospel could literally be heard in the street. In brazen disregard of the Edict of Worms, Luther’s books were openly on sale, and the city was awash in Flugschriften denouncing papal tyranny and priestly greed. Anticlerical sentiment ran so deep that when the nuncio Chieregati arrived, the town council denied him permission for the usual ceremonial entry on a white charger caparisoned in purple.
During the initial weeks of the conclave, Chieregati stayed in the background, waiting for his moment. Not until December 10 did he address the matter of Luther in any detail. He noted the rise in disorder caused by Luther’s doctrines, the urgent need to enforce the Edict of Worms, and the pope’s intention of rectifying curial abuses. The delegates replied that they could take no decision on such matters until they had the pope’s proposals in writing.
Throughout the proceedings, Chieregati had kept in close touch with Rome, and toward the end of December he received from Adrian a brief outlining his reform proposals. Drawing on it, the nuncio on January 3, 1523, gave a speech that would become famous in Reformation annals. With resonant solemnity he described the great grief with which the Vatican was afflicted because of the prospering of the Lutheran sect, and he emphasized the pope’s eager desire that a speedy end be put to this plague lest Germany become another Bohemia. The German people should be moved by the infamy that Luther was bringing upon their nation. It was time for the princes and clergy of the empire to order a halt to the grievous insults that the Lutherans were directing at God and to enforce at once the apostolic sentence and imperial edict.
To the delegates, all of this sounded familiar. But then Chieregati began speaking of the ills in Rome in a new key. He referred to the “many abominations” that in recent years had arisen in the Holy See. The disease had spread from the head to the members, from supreme pontiffs to low-ranking clerics. Under the new pope, however, the Vatican would spare no effort to ensure that the Roman Curia, from which the evil emanated, was speedily reformed. At the same time, Chieregati cautioned, no one should be surprised if not all these wrongs were corrected at once, for the disease had taken such deep root that the cure could proceed only slowly. As for the complaints that the Holy See had disregarded the lists of grievances submitted in the past, he said, the new pope could not be held responsible for what had gone before. Adrian was resolved to abstain from such abuses during the whole of his pontificate, and he had requested a list of benefices that had gone “to actors and stable-boys rather than to learned men” so that when vacancies occurred, worthy candidates could be named to fill them.
Had Chieregati stopped there, he might have carried the day. But, reflecting the Holy See’s unbounded regard for its own authority, he added several warnings. Given how Luther had seduced the German nation from the way shown by the Savior and how his teachings had encouraged disobedience and license, the delegates had “to quench this fire” and by all possible means recall Luther and other instigators of error to the right path. If, God forbid, they would not listen, then “the rod of severity and punishment” would be used according to the laws of the empire and the imperial edict. “God knows our willingness to forgive, but if it should be proved that the evil has penetrated so far that gentle means of healing are of no avail, then we must have recourse to a method of severity in order to safeguard the members as yet untainted by disease.”
Then, in a grave miscalculation, Chieregati demanded not only that the imperial edict be enforced but that the city’s four evangelical preachers be arrested. They were to be thrown into chains and sent to Rome to be punished. Chieregati further accused their leader, the Hebrew scholar Osiander, of being a Jew (which he was not).
The delegates listened in disbelief. Arresting the four preachers, they knew, would likely touch off disturbances. Indeed, as word of Chieregati’s demands spread through Nuremberg, protesters filled its streets, and the police had to be called out. The charged atmosphere was captured in a letter from Willibald Pirckheimer to his friend Erasmus in Basel. Pirckheimer shared Erasmus’s reservations about Luther’s faith-based spirituality, but he was appalled by what he called Chieregati’s “brazen falsehoods” and “outrageous actions,” which “very nearly caused serious rioting.” The legate had become so unpopular that he could not show his face in public without embarrassment. No one “pays him the slightest respect, and he is the laughingstock and butt of the whole population.”
In the end, the estates of the diet rejected Chieregati’s demands. Since there were errors and abuses on all sides, they said, the pope should convene a general council of the Church to address them. The reformist preachers were not arrested but instead summoned to the Rathaus and urged to moderate their language and avoid controversial subjects. Penalties were prescribed for all who ate meat on fast days, and booksellers and printers were warned not to produce or sell Lutheran books. Such books, however, remained openly on sale. The Luther affair, Chieregati wrote to an Italian marquis, had taken such root among the people “that a thousand men would not suffice to eradicate it,” and he himself had been “subjected to threats, outrages, defamatory libels, and all such insults as can possibly be borne.”
The same ferment that was present in Nuremberg was occurring in many other parts of Germany—especially its cities. There, literacy rates were higher than in smaller communities. (As much as 30 percent of the population could read in large cities, compared with 5 to 10 percent outside them.) The cities were also more open to new ideas, and the printing houses there helped disseminate them. Many cities, moreover, were characterized by glaring social and economic inequities, which created resentment among artisans and laborers toward the ruling elite, and this resentment in turn offered fertile ground for populist doctrines. Luther’s rejection of the division between the clergy and the laity and his insistence that all believers are priests became the basis for challenging the status quo and demanding social justice.
As in Nuremberg, sermons became a key means of spreading Lutheran ideas, and the demand for reformist preachers became a signpost of the Reformation. Everywhere, though, that demand faced strong resistance from the old order. In Strasbourg, for instance, a forceful preacher named Matthäus Zell was attracting large crowds to the cathedral with his expositions of the Gospels. When the small chapel assigned to him proved inadequate, he sought to move to the great stone pulpit that dominated the nave, but the canons, refusing permission, kept the door to it locked. To accommodate him, some carpenters who lived nearby built a portable wooden pulpit that was carried into the church for each sermon, then carted home by a group of burghers. From these contested beginnings, the new creed would spread with such speed that within two years Strasbourg would challenge Wittenberg and Zurich for intellectual leadership of the movement.
From such large population centers, preachers fanned out to smaller ones. Most were itinerants who, dismissed from their posts for spreading seditious ideas, carried their Luther Bibles and preaching manuals with them as they sought new positions. From pulpits in modest parish churches and on village greens under the lime trees, these renegade preachers proclaimed the new gospel, giving biblical sanction to long-standing grievances against both clerical and oligarchic despotism. With its declaration that a Christian is a free man, subject to none, and that no law could be imposed on him without his consent, the Lutheran creed was working a dramatic change in the German consciousness.
Adrian’s letter to Erasmus arrived in Basel in mid-January 1523. On seeing the pope’s expression of support for him, Erasmus felt greatly relieved. He would call the letter his Breve aureum (“golden brief”) and frequently flourish it before opponents. He was less pleased with Adrian’s request that he write against Luther. If he complied, he knew, he would be seen as the pope’s lackey, with predictable consequences for his reputation and safety.
In his reply, Erasmus noted that the religious discord had reached such a stage that
no scholar, least of all himself, could quell it by pen and ink. “My popularity, if I had any, has either cooled off so far that it scarcely exists, or has quite evaporated, or has even turned into hatred.” Erasmus ruefully recalled a time when he had received hundreds of letters proclaiming him “the greatest of the great, prince of the world of literature, bright star of Germany, luminary of learning, champion of humane studies, bulwark of a more genuine theology.” Now, on the rare occasions when he was mentioned at all, it was to be slandered by madmen, and not just in Germany. He could hardly name all the regions in which “the minds of ordinary people have been penetrated by support of Luther and hatred of the papacy.” Day and night he toiled “for the good of all men at my own costs and charges,” yet he received “no recompense except to be torn in pieces by both sides.”
Erasmus offered a list of reasons for declining the pope’s invitation to visit Rome—the prospect of traveling over the snow-covered Alps, the dirty inns with their foul-smelling stoves and acidic wines, his poor health. (For months, Erasmus had been tormented by attacks of the stone—“my own executioner,” he called it.) Finally, Erasmus warned the pope against dealing with the matter of Luther by force. The growth had spread too far to be curable by the knife. Whatever course was taken, he feared, the whole business would “end in appalling bloodshed.”
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True Christian Warfare
As the Lutheran movement spread and the clamor over it grew, the man at the center of it all was living in a small room in the Augustinian monastery in Wittenberg, sleeping on a straw mattress with a rough blanket to cover him. By now, almost all of the friars had fled the Black Cloister; the prior himself was eager to leave but had agreed to remain to help Luther run the place. Luther’s one regular source of income was the modest stipend he received for preaching at the town church. Seeing his writing as a spiritual office, he continued to decline all compensation for it, leaving it to his publishers to reap the profits—which were considerable. Lucas Cranach would earn a fortune off Luther’s Bible, and between 1523 and 1525 three other printers would set up shop in the city.
So, while many of those around him thrived, Luther lived in near poverty. At one point he complained to Spalatin that the prior of the monastery had no money to pay the tax collector for the supplies of malt it used to brew beer. But Frederick was unmoved. While granting Luther the right to live and operate openly in Wittenberg, he remained stingy toward him. However unchristian such a policy might seem, it reflected the intense pressure the elector was under. The final statement adopted at the Diet of Nuremberg in early 1523 directed him to make sure that Luther did not speak or write publicly, and Adrian VI sent him a stern letter reproving him for letting a heretic live openly in his territory. Henry VIII—still fuming over Luther’s attack—wrote to Frederick and other Saxon princes to ask how the Germans could continue to “bear such disgrace from a good-for-nothing friar.” He urged the elector to restrain the Lutherans, “without bloodshed if possible, but, if not, by any means.”
Most indignant of all was Duke George. His secret service, which was adept at intercepting letters, had gotten hold of the one in which Luther had referred to him as a water bladder. Furious, the duke sent Luther an angry note, demanding to know if he had in fact used such ugly language and wanting to be informed of his position “so that we may know how to act as our honor shall demand.” In his reply, Luther—incensed at George’s continued plotting against him—referred to him as “your Disgrace” and declared that he would not “tremble for a mere bladder, God willing.”
Unable to get at Luther physically, Duke George took aim at his books, especially his translation of the New Testament. On November 7, 1522, the duke issued a decree prohibiting its sale or use in his territory and demanding that everyone in possession of a copy surrender it (for reimbursement). Luther began receiving anxious inquiries as to whether people should comply. He was torn. On the one hand, Paul at Romans 13 had declared that everyone should be subject to the governing authorities; by that standard, all copies should be handed over. Such a course, however, would run counter to Luther’s convictions about remaining true to one’s conscience. At Worms, he had rejected the emperor’s demand that he retract what was in his books. Should faithful Christians now meekly hand over theirs?
To address such questions, Luther produced Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed. In it, he set forth the core political principle that would guide him through the coming tumult and which would become inscribed in German Lutheranism. It was inspired by Augustine. In the City of God, the bishop of Hippo proposed the idea of the two cities, heavenly and earthly. Adapting it, Luther proposed the existence of two kingdoms. In the heavenly kingdom there dwell the true believers in Christ. Here, princely authority does not apply. Matters of faith and belief, which belong to this realm, must remain the province of personal conscience. The earthly kingdom, by contrast, is home to the unrighteous, with all the attendant sin and disorder. Here princely power does apply, and even faithful Christians must submit to it. “The soul is not under the authority of Caesar,” Luther wrote; one’s life and property are.
So, if a prince commands his subjects to believe this or that or demands that they hand over certain books, they should refuse, for in such cases the prince is overreaching and commanding that which he has no right to. As for the “tyrants” who demand that the German New Testament be turned over, their subjects “should not turn in a single page, not even a letter, on pain of losing their salvation.” These tyrants, he wrote with typical ferocity, act “as murderers of Christ.” Heresy “can never be restrained by force.” It is a spiritual matter, “where you cannot hack to pieces with iron, consume with fire, or drown in water.” Here, God’s Word alone prevails. Although the Jews and heretics were burned, none of them “has been or will be convinced or converted thereby.”
Luther, in short, was trying to distinguish between internal belief and external action. Christians had to uphold the former without resorting to the latter. Faith was critical—acts in the real world were not. Luther’s political position thus mirrored his theological preference for faith over works.
In the last section of Temporal Authority, Luther warned the princes about the fire that was building. Common men and women were at last beginning to think for themselves, and dissatisfaction with princely rule was rising. Unless the princes began to govern more justly, they might feel the fury of the mob. “Men will not, men cannot, men refuse to endure your tyranny and wantonness much longer.” The world was no longer what it once was, when princes hunted down and drove the people like so much game. If they continued to brandish the sword in this way, they should beware lest someone come and compel them to sheathe it—“and not in God’s name!”
But what if the princes did not change their ways? What recourse would Herr Omnes then have? Was there any point at which faithful Christians could justifiably act on their beliefs and actively resist a despot? This was one of the critical political questions of the sixteenth century. For Luther, the growing agitation in the countryside was reinforcing his distrust of spontaneous popular action, and in Temporal Authority he was again trying to make clear that his galvanizing religious ideas were not to be applied in the secular sphere.
Yet he continued to feed the unrest. Around the same time that he wrote Temporal Authority, Luther became involved in a dispute in Leisnig, a small town seventy miles from Wittenberg, over the appointment of a new pastor. With much of the population embracing the new gospel, the local congregation wanted a pastor who could preach it. But the abbot of a nearby Cistercian monastery, who had the right of patronage over the town, opposed them. Luther was asked to visit. He did, on September 25, 1522, and he discussed with local parishioners their desire to name their own priest and to establish a common chest like the one in Wittenberg. The efforts to reach a compromise failed, however, and a delegation from the town visited Wittenberg to ask Luther to provide a scriptural basis for the congregation
’s right to appoint its own pastor.
He agreed. The result—That a Christian Assembly or Congregation Has the Right and Power to Judge All Teaching and to Call, Appoint, and Dismiss Teachers, Established and Proven by Scripture—was another soaring manifesto aimed at democratizing the faith. Luther’s starting point was his idea that all believers are priests. Christ, he wrote, takes the right and power to judge teachings from bishops, scholars, and councils and gives them to all Christians equally. “Spiritual tyrants” who teach things contrary to God’s Word should be “chased away as wolves, thieves, and murderers.” If a Christian congregation is in possession of the Gospel, it has not only the right but the duty to expose and rescind the authority that bishops and abbots seek to impose. Even if there were decent bishops who wanted to appoint decent preachers, “they still could not and should not do so without the will, the election, and the call of the congregation.”
For centuries, the Church’s hierarchy had reserved the right to name all clergy, from popes to parish priests. Luther now wanted to transfer that authority to the congregation. In place of ordination from above, he wanted nomination from below. Luther was here advancing the radical principle of congregationalism—local control of church affairs. Centuries later, it would become a prominent strain in American Protestantism. More immediately, That a Christian Assembly would further rouse Herr Omnes.
A revealing snapshot of Luther on the cusp of the dramatic events that were about to transform his life is offered by Johannes Dantiscus, the ambassador of the Polish king to the court of Charles V. Returning to Poland in the spring of 1523 after three years in Spain, Dantiscus decided to stop in Wittenberg to see the renowned reformer. As he neared the town, he found the surrounding fields flooded by the swollen Elbe and the farmers cursing Luther; because people had eaten meat during Lent, they believed, God was visiting his wrath on the countryside. The ambassador had to leave his horses at the bank of the river and cross it in a boat over to the town. There he met several young men learned in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, foremost among them Melanchthon, who entertained him throughout his three-day stay. The envoy told Melanchthon of his desire to see Luther, for, as he wrote, “whoever sees Rome without the pope, or Wittenberg without Luther, has really seen nothing.”
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