Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  Miriam Usher Chrisman, in her pioneering studies of early Reformation-era pamphlets published in Germany and Switzerland, observes that as early as 1522 there were already numerous printed lay responses to the doctrinal questions raised by Luther.4 (It is impossible to exaggerate the value of Chrisman’s work, and the studies of microhistorians in many countries, in illuminating and elucidating the diverse grass-roots effects of a movement that is often portrayed only through the actions of its most famous leaders.) Many pamphlets dealt directly with the issue of conversion and with the strain created by religious dissension within families that had members in both camps. Some were actually composed in the form of a dialogue between relatives.

  One pamphlet is addressed by a married woman to her sister, a cloistered nun who had been deeply disturbed to hear (family gossip apparently penetrated the convent walls) that her sister and brother-in-law had become Protestants.*4 The wife tells her sister that Christ taught, “I am the door through which you must go to the father.” Religious orders, however, had established all sorts of other requirements—setting themselves apart from and above fellow Christians trying to please God simply by following Gospel teachings. “One [order] wears black, another grey,” the married sister writes. “One does not handle money, another does not touch the plough in the field. The conventuals had set up their own rules, forgetting the unity of the spirit, the bond of peace which Christ had preached.” The married woman then implores her sister to read the Bible herself, in her own language. “How much,” she asks, “do you and your cloistered sisters understand of your Latin songs and chants? Probably not much more than the miller’s donkey.”5 If this pamphlet originated as a real letter from one sister to another, it can hardly have been comforting to the nun! Its tart rather than conciliatory tone offers real insight into the less-than-equable effect of conversions on relations between family members on opposite sides of the growing religious divide.

  Another pamphlet, also revealing the process of proselytizing within a family, takes the form of a dialogue between a Protestant son and a Catholic father. Published in 1523 under the signature of Steffan von Büllheym, the pamphlet deals with the dismissal of a number of priests by the Catholic bishop of Strasbourg for expressing what were considered Lutheran views from their pulpits. The son tells the father that he should not place any faith in the Catholic authorities, because they have shown themselves to be corrupt by selling indulgences and peddling phony relics—such as a stone said to have been thrown at Stephen, the first martyr, and a saint’s bone that was really a sheep’s bone. The father initially replies that he sees nothing wrong with many such time-honored religious practices, like his own habit of placing a penny on the altar every morning to save a soul from hell. The son laughs and observes that he never knew such power could be found in a mere penny. The argument focuses on the possible arrest of another priest, one Matthias Zell, who had begun to preach directly from the Gospels instead of relying on church doctrine. Here the father, who has heard Master Matthias preach and likes what was said, begins to change his mind and agrees with his son that there is no justice to be expected from clerical judicial authorities. The father’s change of heart is hastened by the son’s references to the church’s corrupt practice of providing priests with concubines instead of allowing them to marry the women who, in many cases, had shared their lives for years. The author’s tone is somewhat unusual, in that it expresses sympathy rather than contempt for the female concubines, who “willingly submitted to hatred and abuse because they loved their consorts.” The fault is attributed not to the priests and not to their women but to the church itself. The father, convinced by these arguments, finally agrees with his son that he can no longer believe the Catholic clergy but will henceforth live by “the Evangelical teaching and the truth of God’s word.”6 The pamphlet wraps up the father’s conversion neatly and swiftly, rather in the manner of a police procedural that must solve a crime and restore justice within one television hour. It is reasonable to assume that most family battles over religion went on for years and were resolved—if they were resolved—in messier and slower fashion, with hurt feelings all around. A Protestant’s making fun of her Catholic sister’s knowledge of Latin, and the sister’s refusing to recognize the baptism of a Protestant baby, sounds like the behavior of real families when their members rebel against a fundamental “family value.”

  Yet, as Chrisman observes, both of these pamphlets “show that lay men and women did not simply repeat, parrot fashion, the arguments of the theologians.” Although statements about such issues as priestly celibacy, indulgences, and the direct relationship between Scripture and individual conscience had already been made by Luther, Huldrych Zwingli in Switzerland, and other, less known Protestant reformers, “in each case the lay person constructed his own argument, reflecting his particular view of the problem.”7 The pamphlets were strongly anticlerical, but it was an anticlericalism directed more at what the authors considered false doctrines than, as in the pre-Reformation era, at individual instances of corruption or lavish living by church officials. The shift from individual to institutional anticlericalism was the intellectual turning point of the Reformation; dissatisfied Catholics struggling to remain loyal to Rome could no longer say that, if only the pope knew what was going on, he would rectify the injustices perpetrated by his priest and bishops. Corrupt and oppressive systems dependent on centralized power can only exist as long as subjects do not challenge the ultimate goodness of the ruler. This was as true in pre printing press Europe as it would be half a millennium later in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union; many memoirs by camp survivors talk about prisoners who were convinced that Stalin had been betrayed by his subordinates and that, if only the Leader knew about the injustices, their sentences would be reversed.

  Some of the most extraordinary sixteenth-century pamphlets were written by literate laymen who, lacking any formal education, demonstrated how the reading of the Bible in the vernacular had led them to tackle theological questions that, since the earliest patristic writings, had been reserved for highly educated church (and church-approved) scholars. Clement Ziegler, a Strasbourg gardener, took it upon himself to preach to his fellow gardeners after he experienced a vision of Christ in a 1524 flood. Ziegler’s preaching, it should be noted, angered Protestant as well as Catholic authorities, since he was an uneducated man by the standards of both. He needed no articles of faith promulgated by any church, Catholic or Protestant, to develop his own rationale for rejecting, say, the doctrine of the transubstantiation. For Ziegler, the Last Supper and Jesus’s breaking of bread were brilliant symbols, not a sacrament, and the belief that bread and wine were actually the body and blood of Christ amounted to idol worship. It was ridiculous, he wrote, to conclude that even when the Communion wafer “is broken into a hundred pieces, still the body of Christ remains in every piece, just as though it still hung on the cross….”8

  Ziegler cannot have been an “ordinary” gardener, because ordinary gardeners, even those who were already extraordinary by virtue of being literate in the early sixteenth century, do not read the Bible and then begin to develop and publicize their own theories about transubstantiation. But he and his fellow pamphleteers provided irrefutable evidence that the genie could never be returned to the bottle. Once people had claimed the right to read words long forbidden unless filtered through ecclesiastical mediators who understood ancient languages, there was no stopping the proliferation of religious ideas. Soldiers of the Inquisition might smash printing presses, but the knowledge of how to construct another one remained. Calvin might rejoice (to the extent that his dour philosophy allowed him to rejoice about anything) at the burning of Michael Servetus’s book on the errors of the Trinity along with the man, but somewhere, in the era of printing, another copy would—and did—survive. (In fact, three copies survived.) And even at a time when paper was much more expensive than it is today, it was relatively cheap to print pamphlets by all of those irrepressible lay theologian
s. The small pamphlets were not glorious art objects like illuminated manuscripts, but those older, beautiful one-of-a-kind manuscripts never reached the sort of people who could easily grasp the assertion that most Catholics understood no more Latin than “a miller’s donkey.”

  The printing press turns up everywhere, regardless of what particular national form the Reformation took, in accounts of major shifts in public opinion that led to conversions from Catholicism to Protestantism. One comical (today) incident that speeded the Reformation in Zürich in the early 1520s involved the forbidden consumption of ordinary Wurst, German sausage, during Lent. (History does not record whether the sausage was bratwurst, knockwurst, or some other variety.) As Kenneth G. Appold, professor of Reformation history at Princeton Theological Seminary, tells the story in a lively short history of the Reformation on the continent, the sausage controversy began on March 9, 1522, when the printer (print, again) Christoph Froschauer offered a plate of the forbidden Fleisch to a group of friends gathered in his shop. “Church law prohibited eating meat during Lent,” Appold reminds us. “Froschauer knew this, as did those who partook of the unholy communion.”9 Zwingli, already a well-known preacher, who held the post of “people’s priest” at the city’s Grossmünster Church, remained at the forbidden feast but did not actually eat the sausage—his own abstinence enabling him to declare his approval of breaking Lenten custom without having to defend himself personally against charges of having sinned. Zwingli soon delivered a sermon supporting the breaking of Lenten rules, noting that fasting was a purely human, ecclesiastically invented and prescribed custom, not mentioned in the Bible. His sermon, titled Von Erkiesen und Freiheit der Speisen (On Choice and the Liberty of Foods), was then published on April 16.

  Publication of the sermon set off a citywide debate, which, in less than six months, resulted in the Zürich city council’s siding with Zwingli against the Catholic bishop and establishing a new post of “city preacher” for him. Of primary importance was the fact that this new post removed Zwingli from ecclesiastical jurisdiction and made him responsible only to the city’s secular magistrates. These actions—beginning with the consumption of a humble sausage and the publication of a sermon—led to the Zürich Disputation of January 1523, between Zwingli and Catholic authorities. The disputation, a key event in the Reformation in Switzerland, resulted in Zwingli’s being acquitted of heresy by secular magistrates. The debate drew an audience of more than six hundred, and many of the speeches were republished in pamphlet form. Absent the printing press, there is simply no way to imagine that events would have moved so swiftly, or moved at all, after one man broke Lenten fasting rules in the presence of a few friends.

  The new force of the printed, infinitely reproducible word added both a public and a private dimension to the worldly calculus involved in previous eras of large-scale religious conversion. The public dimension, perfectly embodied by the Lenten Wurst rebellion in Zürich, involved the ability of publications to multiply the effect of word of mouth.

  The private dimension enabled the individual to engage directly with sacred writings and encouraged the idea that the capacity to seek and grasp religious truth extended not only beyond ecclesiastical bureaucrats but also beyond visionaries like Luther. Conversions to Protestantism—like conversions to Christianity in the late Roman Empire—could certainly be opportunistic. This was true whenever and wherever secular rulers took sides against Catholicism, whether in various cities and regions on the continent or in England, as the half-century reign of the powerful, popular, and politically astute Elizabeth I provided time for the reformed faith to take root as the norm rather than as a dissident creed. But most of these conversions in Northern Europe and England, whatever worldly advantage may have accrued to the convert (as in the case of John Donne), were not forced in the sense that nearly all conversions to Christianity from Judaism and Islam after 1391 in Spain must be suspected, if not presumed, to have been forced. When the blood of a people is running in the streets, its communities being destroyed, and its possessions confiscated, how is it possible to speak of truly “voluntary” conversion? By contrast, the rise of Protestantism in its many forms was a widespread shift of ideas, spread by a medium with greater power to disseminate information and change cultures than the world had ever seen.

  Yet the printing press had another effect: it was also a more efficient medium for spreading hatred. The idea of the Reformation as a movement for “religious tolerance” in the modern sense, with the big, bad Catholic Church as the sole villain, is both an erroneous and an anachronistic concept. Nowhere is this misguided notion more prevalent than in the United States, where we love to tell ourselves that, from the very beginning, we were a people who upheld religious tolerance. It does not fit our national religious myth to acknowledge that the Puritans who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony lost no time in exiling religious dissidents. It took 150 years, the Enlightenment, and more instruction in the horror of theocracies in the Old World before the United States of America became the first nation on the planet to uphold the legal separation of church and state. The early Puritan immigrants had learned their lessons from Old World forebears who were fanatics as well as visionaries. Zwingli, Calvin, and Luther were all great figures in religious history, but they were as hostile to freedom of conscience for those who disagreed with them as the leaders of the Catholic Church were to all Protestants. The printing press spread not only Luther’s and Calvin’s vernacular translations of the Bible but the former’s scurrilous polemics against Jews and the latter’s prescriptions for informing on any fellow citizen suspected of religious unorthodoxy. The early Reformation, precisely because its voluntary conversions were rooted in the idea that individuals could approach God and the truth for themselves, contained the seeds of more conversions and different faiths. But the Protestant churches that had already achieved majority status and political power were not ready or willing to tolerate those faiths on their own turf. Not then. Not there. Not yet.

  * * *

  *1 The formal title of this book, first published in English in 1563, is Acts and Monuments, which emphasizes sixteenth-century Protestant martyrs. Even then, however, the work was popularly referred to as the Book of Martyrs.

  *2 Accounts of the details of this incident vary, but the quotation was widely circulated in sixteenth-century England and appears in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563).

  *3 Although the story of Luther nailing the theses to the door of the university chapel in Wittenberg, where he taught theology, may be apocryphal, it is certain that on October 31 he sent a copy of the theses to the archbishop of Mainz.

  *4 Chrisman believes the internal evidence provided by the style and subject matter of the pamphlet indicates that the author was indeed a woman. The writer, as Chrisman notes, talks about her recently born baby and expresses sorrow that the nun will not use the baby’s name (possibly because a Catholic nun would not consider any Protestant baptism valid and would see the infant as unentitled to a “Christian name”). Although women were much less likely to be literate than men at a time when the vast majority of the population could not read, many women from well-off, educated families—among the mercantile class as well as the aristocracy—did partake of the tutoring accorded their brothers.

  9

  PERSECUTION IN AN AGE OF RELIGIOUS CONVERSION

  ON JULY 22, 2010, the Council of the Lutheran World Federation held a formal service of repentance in Stuttgart, Germany, expressing “deep regret and sorrow” for the sixteenth-century Lutheran persecution of Anabaptists in Europe. The Lutheran council requested forgiveness from God and from many religious denominations descended from the Anabaptists, whose name literally means “baptized again.” American denominations whose origins can be traced to the Anabaptists include Seventh-Day Adventists, Amish, Mennonites, and Hutterites. (The Catholic Church, busily fighting against all of the new forms of Christian faith, did not single out the Anabaptists for special censure.) Anabaptists fl
ed many parts of Europe as a result of persecution by Lutherans and later by Calvinists, and they brought ideas to the New World—specifically, the concept of being “born again” through adult baptism—that have influenced many evangelical faiths since the First and Second Great Awakenings.*1 Zwingli and his followers in Zürich, who had been in real danger of being killed for their Lutheran-influenced beliefs in the early 1520s, needed only a few years to begin killing believers in a new Protestant faith that practiced adult baptism. The Anabaptists rejected infant baptism because it is not mentioned in the Bible, and because (just imagine!) they were perceptive enough to understand that an infant could hardly be expected to make an informed decision embracing a particular religious faith.

  It all began—like Luther’s rebellion over indulgences—with a dispute over money. This time, the issue was tithing; to be more precise, the issue was tithing that did not concede the right of a church community to select its own minister. A small village near Zürich had the temerity to elect its own pastor, one Wilhelm Reublin, without applying for approval from the Zürich Grossmünster chapter headed by Zwingli. This straightforward worldly conflict was also developing in Germany, where Luther had taken the side of wealthy central communities against peasant villages, and the Zürich city council did the same. The issue was clearly one of taxation without representation, and it set some of Zwingli’s inner circle, including an influential preacher named Konrad Grebel, against their leader. To make a long story short, the initial dispute over tithing (again, like the battle over selling indulgences) soon escalated into a larger conflict over the authority of individuals, and individual congregations, to interpret the Scriptures according to their own consciences. Baptism, at that point, became the critical issue, and after a 1525 disputation, the busybody Zürich city council issued a decree that all babies be baptized within eight days of birth; parents who refused to comply would be banished from the community.