43 For a broad approach to this issue, see the contributions to War and Peace: Critical Issues in European Societies and Literature 800–1800 ed. Albrecht Classen and Nadia Margolis (2011). However, the specific reflections by Nicholas of Cusa on this topic is not considered here. But see Markus Riedenauer, Pluralität und Rationalität: die Herausforderung der Vernunft durch religiöse und kulturelle Vielfalt nach Nikolaus Cusanus (1986); Joshua Hollmann, The Religious Concordance: Nicholas of Cusa and Christian-Muslim Dialogue (2017).
8 Tolerance in the Age of the Protestant Reformation
The Quest for Spiritual Truth beyond the Church: Sebastian Franck and Valentin Weigel
Protestant Reformation and Tolerance— A Contradiction?
In the quincentenary of the ninety-five theses being nailed at the door of the castle Church of Wittenberg, in 2017, there is a whole flood of studies that have critically reexamined Martin Luther, the lives of his many compatriots, the inner conflicts and tensions, the controversies, the challenges posed to the Catholic Church, the responses by the traditional clergy, the comments by the many different university professors, especially the theologians, and so forth. At times of a paradigm shift, such as the Protestant Reformation, many of the traditional viewpoints are harshly debated or even rejected, and many different voices attempt to establish their authority, demanding intellectual freedom for themselves in that process—mostly only for themselves and not for the others.1
The demand for tolerance tends to come from minority groups that need breathing space to develop and hope that the majority group will grant them that freedom. Those calls for tolerance, however, cannot be simply equated with a true discourse on this fundamental philosophical concept. Nevertheless, the ideas that contributed to the demands for tolerance certainly form part of a larger discourse that we have traced already throughout the Middle Ages and that became virulent in the early modern age especially because of the global battle between the representatives of the Catholic Church and the Reformers, who soon enough started to fight against each other.2 Theological authority was at stake, and hence also the basic question of toleration/tolerance.3
We can be certain that Luther revolutionized his world through his Reformation movement,4 but he was also not necessarily a revolutionary by himself, regularly reassessing his own principles and values, at first granting thereby his opponents their due despite an ongoing hardening of his own positions during his later life. This was formulated quite poignantly online:
What Luther advocated was the replacement of Catholic religious persecution and oppression with Protestant religious persecution and oppression. He demanded strict obedience to temporal authorities, and he preached that heretics, otherwise known as Christians who held beliefs different from his own, be executed. Luther was also consumed by a hatred for the Jews.5
Recent historians such as Matthias Pohlig have questioned the actual contribution of the entire Protestant Reformation to the emergence of modernity, involving tolerance, capitalism, and individualism.6 Individual freedom from the secular authorities was not at all on the reformers’ minds, and they did not support any spiritual-religious deviations either.
Revolutionaries rarely, if ever, fall into the camp of those who clamor for tolerance and freedom. Instead, Luther was a strong reformer, like many other intellectuals of his timfee and from the late Middle Ages and aimed for the reconstitution of the Church as it used to be in the past, at least according to his own perceptions. He drew on many medieval sources, was inspired by mystics such as Johannes Tauler, followed the lead of the English priest John Wyclif and the Czech priest John Hus, and yet the situation with him and at his time, that is, the intellectual condition, was different than before.
However we might want to evaluate Luther, he simply stands for a paradigm shift of a great magnitude, even though he himself quickly turned into a radically orthodox conservative who displayed no mercy for or patience with any of his religious opponents. So, it does not come as a surprise that Luther cannot be easily associated with the idea of tolerance, if at all. On the contrary, he quickly proved to be a rather dogmatic thinker, resolutely opposed to the peasants and the Jews, fighting ardently against the Anabaptists and other sectarians.7 He opened the door for women only to some extent, which ultimately imposed almost more restrictions on them in intellectual terms than in previous times insofar as he enforced the closure of all monasteries and, thus, robbed women of traditional opportunities to acquire an education and to gain respect for religious positions.8
In short, in light of the latest research, it would be rather far-fetched, if not inappropriate, to associate Luther with the idea and concept of tolerance, especially if we turn to his hostile relationship with deviant thinkers such as Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531), Caspar Schwenckfeld (1490–1561), Thomas Münzer (1489–1525), and others.9 Of course, Luther enjoys our greatest respect today for his insistence on the individual freedom to search for God, who could not be found through the traditional rituals and clerical hierarchy in the Catholic Church. While his ideas of the sola fide and gratia sola offered freedom for the Lutheran believers, that is, for the individual and without assistance from Church authority figures, this approach immediately endangered all other faithfuls who wanted to stay within the fold of their traditional communities. However, there were also a number of urban communities in the age of the Reformation where Catholics and Protestants managed to live together, despite all conflicts.10
Luther and other Reformers recognized, for instance, the Turks for their formally much more superior lifestyle in terms of morality and ethics, for instance, but they did not acknowledge them as equals and could identify them only as God’s instruments to teach Christians a lesson. Otherwise, they definitely rejected the Turks as Muslims, and hence as dangerous enemies of their own religion. This strategy to welcome and reject the others at the same time did not make the Lutherans into tolerant thinkers, of course, as we will also recognize in the texts by Sebastian Franck and Valentin Weigel.11 At the same time, Luther argued most egregiously against the riotous peasants and demanded their total repression,12 and he fought very hard against all deviant religious thinkers.13
Simultaneously, it would not be appropriate to question Luther from a modern perspective and to compare him with modern thinkers, such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781). In fact, it might be highly suspect to search for ideas such as toleration and tolerance among the theological intellectuals of the sixteenth century, at least among those who propagated the theological debates against the Catholic Church, using modern terms and concepts. Those were the ‘military’ vanguard; the fighters who created a new church and who had their plate filled with fundamental theological issues and could not really establish an intellectual framework where such ideas as tolerance could have been considered. Revolutionaries never have time and room to consider alternative concepts contrary to their own value system. But they break up a traditional power structure and, thus, free up other resources through which further ideas can develop by other individuals.
The Protestant Reformation certainly destroyed, at first, the dominant authority of the Catholic Church in some parts of Europe, but it took hundreds of years following the events in 1517 for the idea of tolerance to emerge fully and to take hold even in the Evangelical or Lutheran Church.14 Nevertheless, as I have already argued in the previous chapters, early forms of tolerance, especially of toleration, can be detected in a variety of medieval sources long before the sixteenth century, and we will be able to identify a significant tradition of this discourse even during the age of the Reformation. Those voices, however, would have to be categorized differently insofar as they were free to experiment with their own ideas vis-à-vis different religious concepts and people of other races.
Once the virtually absolute power of the Catholic Church was at risk and individuals could pursue their own ideas about God based on their personal reading of the Bible, the philosophical issue of tolerance gained, at least theo
retically and only in the early phase of the Protestant Reformation, a stronger foothold, while spiritualists and Anabaptists soon were regarded as enemies as well. And we also have to acknowledge that the intellectual framework created by Luther facilitated the spawning of many new ideas and opened, willy-nilly, the floodgates for many individuals who turned to reading the biblical text by themselves and developed their own ideas. Those intellectuals, however, quickly aroused the ire of Luther and his fellow fighters, who then tried their best to control and repress the stream of ever-new reformist thinkers.15
Hence, it would not be completely fair to criticize Luther, above all, as if his reformist thinking might have been responsible for the worst forms of intolerance at his time. All religions from very early on had to face the claims by competing faith-based groups, especially if they were predicated on the idea of monotheism. If a religion postulates that there is only one god, then all others who believe in a different god are automatically regarded as heathens, or pagans, and are thus quickly categorized as condemnable sinners, if not heretics.16
The very nature of the Protestant Reformation in its radical demands on spirituality and direct communication with God imposed very strict concepts on the new church and its adherents. Both Jews and the various Anabaptists, Antitrinitarians, and Spiritualists felt the harsh approach most directly. The young Protestant Church struggled hard to fight its way into existence and could not embrace from early on any ideas of tolerance, especially not against the Catholic Church. In his Schmalkaldic Articles from 1537, for instance, Luther specifically identified certain concepts that could be debated with the other side, but then also other concepts that had to be subscribed to absolutely without any deviation. Tolerance, hence, would not have been possible in that regard. But would he even have wanted to aim for such an ideal or allow it to come to fruition?17
As Volker Leppin has pointed out, each document that either addresses or reflects ideas of tolerance/intolerance has to be viewed within its own context. It mattered centrally if its author was in a position of strength, or of weakness, and smaller groups of sectarians naturally demanded to be respected, since only within the framework of tolerance could they survive, as we find it formulated, for instance, in the thirty-six theses published by the Anabaptist Balthasar Hubmaier (1485–1525).18 Much depends on the power structure and the specific ideological orientation, both among the Lutheran reformers and the various Anabaptist groups, and we can easily detect radical groups on the left and on the right, some propounding tolerance, often for the purpose of their own self-preservation, and some fighting the other thinkers in a more radical fashion, not all enthused by the idea of tolerance.19
The most intriguing position regarding tolerance was the one embraced by theologians such as Sebastian (Sebastien) Castellio, who had arrived in Geneva in 1541 and assumed the position of a school principal there, quickly getting into conflicts with John Calvin. In 1554, he published the treatise De haereticis an sind persequendi and pointed out that since the time of the Lutheran Reformation, innumerable groups of independent religious thinkers had emerged, and this as the result of the very incertitude of human intellect and rationality in face of such complex issues concerning the relationship of people and God: “que profecto dissidia nun aliunde proficiscuntur quam ex ignorantia veritatis” (these intellectual exchanges result truly from nowhere else but from the ignorance of the truth).20
Here I want to focus especially on two sixteenth-century theologians, Sebastian Franck and Valentin Weigel because both can be credited with having established early forms of toleration, to say the least, and subtly and yet firmly questioned the absolutist position by the Protestant Church. Both thinkers have been in the focus of more recent research, but only within the German-speaking world, apart from a few exceptions.21 Even then, many of their texts are still awaiting a careful analysis, especially in light of the complex relationship between the Christian faith and other religions. The term ‘tolerance’ has been applied to both in various contexts, but the careful examination of the various texts where such a phenomenon might arise continues to be a desideratum, especially since the concept of ‘toleration’ seems to be more at work at that time.
Sebastian Franck
Sebastian Franck was born on January 20, 1499 in Donauwörth as the son of a specialized weaver.22 He studied in Ingolstadt and Heidelberg and became a priest in the bishopric of Augsburg and vicar in Büchenbach between Schwabach and Roth in 1526. He joined the Protestant movement full of enthusiasm and became a sacristan in Gustenfelden near Nuremberg in 1527. The following year, he quit his position and moved to Nuremberg, where he married Ottilie Behaim on March 17, 1528. During that time, he translated Andreas Althamer von Brentz’s Latin Diallage (1528) and published his first independent treatise, Von dem greulichen Laster der Trunckenheit (Augsburg, 1531; Of the Terrible Vice of Drunkenness), arguing that a change in one’s religious conviction would require also a change in one’s lifestyle.23 Subsequently, he quit his job as minister, but we do not yet quite know the reasons for his decision, unless he felt the uselessness of his spiritual teachings or his personal inability to reach out to his audience. During that time, he also published his Klagbrieff oder supplication der armen dürftigen in England (Nuremberg, 1529; Letter of Lament or Supplication of the Poor People in England), which was the translation of Simon Fish’s English satire on the clergy. ‘Satire’ might be a too soft term, however, because this text is determined by an extreme attack on the members of the Church who abuse their power and pursue only vices in the pretense of being holy representatives of God here on earth. Franck uses the term ‘locusts’ for the clerics and identifies them as rapacious wolves who threaten to destroy the entire land. Moreover, he calls them the “feind des Creutz” (219; enemies of the cross).24
Thereupon appeared his Chronica und Beschreibung der Türkei (Nuremberg, 1529; Chronicle and Description of Turkey), the German translation of the account by the Transylvanian-German Georgius of Hungary who had been held as a slave in Turkey for many years,25 and then Ein künstlich höfflich Declamation (Nuremberg, 1531), which was the translation of a work by Philipp Bernaldus.26
In the Fall of 1529, or Spring of 1530, Franck moved to Straßburg, where he came into contact with many Anabaptists and Spiritualists, such as Caspar Schwenckfeld and Michael Servet or Servetus.27 Here in Straßburg, he completed his massive, but also most controversial, Chronica, Zeitbuch und Geschichtsbibel (Chronicle and Historical Bible), in which he also included the famous Zwingli and particularly Erasmus of Rotterdam, who quickly complained about it and called for a judicial trial against the author. It remains highly doubtful, however, whether they had really studied that Chronica since the author gives much praise to the famous humanist and explicitly condemns Erasmus’s opponents who maligned him as a heretic (p. CXVIII), and when he acknowledged his accomplishments posthumously (p. CCLXXIIII—yet, this seems to have been written by the later author responsible for the second edition).28 Franck was subsequently unjustly, as we would say today, expelled from Straßburg on December 30, 1531.29 His Chronica was no longer allowed to be sold, probably because here Franck formulated too trenchant and biting thoughts about the selfish motives of any cleric in deciding dogmatic issues.30 Nevertheless, it reappeared, probably considerably expanded considering the inclusion of many later events well beyond 1531, in printed editions in 1536, 1558, 1553, 1565, 1569, 1585, 1665, etc.; hence it enjoyed a long and enduring popularity for a number of reasons, both because of a skillful compilation technique and of the appealing style.31
Thereafter, Franck moved to Esslingen, where he made a living as a soap maker. In 1533, he moved to Geislingen, from where he could successfully sell his products at the market of Ulm. On October 28, 1534, Franck received the privilege to settle in Ulm as a fully established citizen there. He worked as corrector in the print shop run by Hans Varnier, but already the following year Franck opened his own print shop and bookstore.32
Franck’s religious
opponents, such as the influential Johannes Bugenhagen (1485–1558), Martin Bucer (1491–1551), Martin Frecht (1494–1556), Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), and the Landgrave Philipp of Marburg (1504–1567)—all Protestants and major leaders in the Reformation—did not rest until they could bring about Franck’s expulsion from Ulm in 1539. Both he and Schwenckfeld were condemned as Spiritualists during a convention of theologians in Schmalkalden in 1540. Consequently, Franck moved to Basel and set up his own shop as a printer and bookseller without running into further theological problems until the end of his life. He died there in 1542 or 1543.33
In a famous song, “Von vier zwiträchtigen Kirchen deren jede die ander verhasset und verdammet,” he formulated his explicit opposition to the Catholic and the Protestant Churches, to the Reformed Church under Zwingli, and to the Anabaptists, while he mostly leaned toward the Spiritualists. For him, all attempts to set up authority figures by way of publishing theological treatises were in vain because he believed only in the divine inspiration as to be experienced by the individual.34 Peter Knauer credits him for his critical stance opposing all organized churches and pays him great respect for his ‘quasi-objective’ attitude with respect to the theological issues debated at his time. Right from the start, Franck rejects the Papists, hence the members of the Catholic Church, because they would not truly live up to their own faith and rely only on external rituals: “Sie machen dleut zu affen” (stanza 1, 6; they make people into monkeys).35 Insofar as the Catholic priests insist on the strict observation of their customary rules and regulations, they would gain much money, which turns out to be their own true god. Franck can only comment: “ich merck den Spott” (stanza 1, 10; I figure out this mockery). As to the Lutherans, the poet ridicules their stringent insistence on faith alone, which would confuse people in the long run without giving them true understanding of God (stanza 2). It does not become really clear where his criticism is directed at, but there is no doubt about his strong objections to the Lutheran teachings, which only interiorizes the faith without giving ordinary people the help they would really need. The Reformists under Zwingli do not fare better at all here and are rejected outright as well because they exhaust their religious fervor in nothing but foolish iconoclasm (stanza 3): “Kein Göttlich krafft / noch Geistlich Safft / da wird gespürt” (stanza 3, 7–9; one does not feel any divine strength nor spiritual juice).
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