THE REFORMATION AND FREETHOUGHT
§ 1. GERMANY AND SWITZERLAND
In the circumstances set forth in the last chapter, the Reformation
could stand for only the minimum of freethought needed to secure
political action. Some decided unbelief there was within its
original sphere; [2016] the best known instance being the private
latitudinarianism of such humanist teachers as Mutianus (Mudt) and
Crotus (Jäger), of the Erfurt University, in the closing years of the
fifteenth century. Trained in Italy, Mutianus, after his withdrawal
to private life at Gotha, in his private correspondence [2017]
avowed the opinion that the sacred books contained many designed
fables; that the books of Job and Jonah were such; and that there
was a secret wisdom in the Moslem opinion that Christ himself was
not crucified, his place being taken by someone resembling him. To
his young friend Spalatin he propounded the question: "If Christ
alone be the way, the truth, and the life, how went it with the men
who lived so many centuries before his birth? Had they had no part
in truth and salvation?" And he hints the answer that "the religion
of Christ did not begin with his incarnation, but is as old as the
world, as his birth from the Father. For what is the real Christ,
the only Son of God, save, as Paul says, the Wisdom of God, with
which he endowed not only the Jews in their narrow Syrian land, but
also the Greeks, the Romans, and the Germans, however different might
be their religious usages." Though some such doctrine could be found
in Eusebius, [2018] it was remarkable enough in the Germany of four
hundred years ago. But Mutianus went still further. To his friend
Heinrich Urban he wrote that "there is but one God and one Goddess"
under the many forms and names of Jupiter, Sol, Apollo, Moses, Christ,
Luna, Ceres, Proserpina, Tellus, Maria. "But," he prudently added,
"heed that you do not spread it abroad. One must hide it in silence,
like Eleusinian mysteries. In religious matters we must avail ourselves
of the cloak of fable and enigma. Thou, with the grace of Jupiter--that
is, the best and greatest God--shouldst silently despise the little
Gods. When I say Jupiter, I mean Christ and the true God. But enough
of these all too high things." Such language hints of much current
rationalism that can now only be guessed at, since it was unsafe even
to write to friends as Mutianus did. On concrete matters of religion he
is even more pronounced, laughing at the worship of the coat and beard
and foreskin of Jesus, calling Lenten food fool's food, contemning
the begging monks, rejecting confession and masses for the dead,
and pronouncing the hours spent in altar-service lost time. In his
house at Gotha, behind the Cathedral, his friend Crotus burlesqued
the Mass, called the relics of saints bones from the gallows, and
otherwise blasphemed with his host. [2019]
But such esoteric doctrine and indoors unbelief can have had no part
in the main movement; and though at the same period we see among
the common people the satirist Heinrich Bebel, a Swabian peasant's
son, jesting for them over the doctrines of trinity in unity, the
resurrection, doomsday, and the sacraments, [2020] it is certain that
that influence counted for little in the way of serious thinking. It
was only as separate and serious heresies that such doctrines could
long propagate themselves; and Luther in his letter to the people
of Antwerp [2021] speaks of one sect or group as rejecting baptism,
another the eucharist, another the divinity of Jesus, and yet another
affirming a middle state between the present life and the day of
judgment. One teacher in Antwerp he describes as saying that every
man has the Holy Ghost, that being simply reason and understanding,
that there is no hell, and that doing as we would be done by is
faith; but this heretic does not seem to have founded a sect. The
most extensive wave of really innovating thought was that set up by
the social and anti-sacerdotal revolt of the Anabaptists, among whom
occurred also the first popular avowals of Unitarianism.
In the way of literature, Unitarian doctrine came from John Campanus,
of Jülich; Ludwig Hetzer, a priest of Zürich; and (in a minor degree)
Johann Denk, school-rector in Nüremberg in 1524, [2022] and afterwards
one of the earlier leaders of the Anabaptist movement. All three
were men of academic training; and Hetzer, who wrote explicitly
against the divinity of Christ, had previously made with the aid of
Denk a German translation, which was used by Luther, of the Hebrew
prophets (1527). He was beheaded at Constance in 1529, nominally on
the charge of practising free-love. [2023] Campanus, who published a
book attacking the doctrine of the Trinity and the teaching of Luther,
had to leave Wittemberg in consequence, and finally died after a long
imprisonment in Cleve. Denk--an amiable and estimable man [2024]--is
said, on very scant grounds, to have recanted before he died.
Not only from such thoroughgoing heresy, but from the whole Anabaptist
secession, and no less from the rising of the peasants, the main
Lutheran movement kept itself utterly aloof; and, though the Catholics
naturally identified the extremer parties with the Reformation, its
official or "Centre" polity made little for intellectual or political
as distinct from ecclesiastical innovation. Towards the Peasants'
Revolt, which at first he favoured, inasmuch as the peasants, whom
he had courted, came to him for counsel, Luther's final attitude was
so brutal that it has to-day almost no apologist; and in this as in
some of his other evil departures the "mild" Melanchthon went with
him. [2025] Their doctrine was the very negation of all democracy,
and must be interpreted as an absolute capitulation to the nobles,
without whose backing they knew themselves to be ecclesiastically
helpless. In the massacres to which Luther gave his eager approval a
hundred thousand men were destroyed. [2026] "From this time onwards,"
pronounces Baur, "Luther ceases to be the representative of the
spirit of his time; he represents only one side of it.... Thenceforth
his writings have no more the universal bearing they once had,
but only a particular.... In the political connection we must date
from Luther's attitude to the Peasants' War the Lutheran theory of
unconditional obedience. Christianity, as Luther preached it, has
given to princes unlimited power of despotism and tyranny; while the
poor man, who, without right of protest, must submit to everything,
will be compensated for his earthly sufferings in heaven." [2027]
Naturally the princes henceforth grew more and more Lutheran.
As naturally the crushed peasantry turned away from the Reformation in
despair. Luther had in the first instance approached them, not they
him. Before the revolt the reformers had made the peasant a kind of
hero in their propaganda; [2028] and when in the first and moderate
stage of the rising its motives were set forth in sixty-two articles,
these were purely agrarian. "There is no trace of a religious element
in them, no indication that their authors had ever heard of Luther
or of the Gospel." [2029] Then it was that Luther commended them;
and thereafter "a religious element began to obtrude." [2030] When
the overthrow began, doubtless sincerely reprobating the violences of
the insurgents, he hounded on the princes in their work of massacre,
Melanchthon chiming in. Thereafter, as Melanchthon admitted, the
people showed a detestation of the Lutheran clergy; [2031] and among
many there was even developed a kind of "materialistic atheism." [2032]
The political outcome, as aforesaid, was a thoroughly undemocratic
organization of Protestantism in Germany; and, though the
ecclesiastical tyranny which resulted from the more democratic system
of Calvin was not more favourable to progress or happiness, the final
German system of cujus regio, ejus religio--every district taking
the religion of its ruler--must be summed up as a mere negation of
the right of private judgment. Save for the attempt of a Frenchman,
François Lambert of Avignon, to organize a self-governing church,
German Protestantism showed almost no democratic feeling. [2033] The
one poor excuse for Luther was that the peasants had never recognized
the need or duty of maintaining their clergy. [2034] And seeing how
the wealth of the Church went to the nobles and the well-to-do, and
how downtrodden were the peasants all along, it would be surprising
indeed if they had. They were not the workers of the ecclesiastical
Reformation, and it wrought little or nothing for them.
The side on which the whole movement made for new light was its
promotion of common schools, which enabled many of the people for
the first time to read. [2035] This tendency had been seen among
the Waldenses, the Lollards, and the Hussites, and for the same
reasons. Such movements depended for their existence on the reading
of the sacred books by the people for themselves; and to make readers
was their first concern. In this connection, of course, note must
be taken of the higher educational revival before the Reformation,
[2036] without which the ecclesiastical revolution could not have
taken place even in Germany. As we saw, a literary expansion preceded
the Hussite movement in Bohemia; and the stir of concern for written
knowledge, delightedly acclaimed by Ulrich von Hutten, is recognized by
all thoughtful historians in Germany before the rise of Luther. Such
enlightenment as that of Mutianus was far in advance of Luther's own;
and enlightenment of a lower degree cannot have been lacking. The
ability to read, indeed, must have been fairly general in the middle
class in Germany, for it appears that the partisan favour shown
everywhere to Luther's writings by the printers and booksellers gave
him an immense propagandist advantage over his Catholic opponents,
who could secure for their replies only careless or bad workmanship,
and were thus made to seem actually illiterate in the eyes of the
reading public. [2037]
As regards Switzerland, again, it is the admitted fact that "the
educational movement began before the religious revival, and was a
cause of the Reformation rather than a result." [2038] So in Holland,
the Brethren of the Common Lot (Fratres Vitæ Communis), a partially
communistic but orthodox order of learned and unlearned laymen which
lasted from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, did much for
the schooling of the common people, and passed on their impulse to
Germany. [2039] Similarly in Scotland the schools seem to have been
fairly numerous even in the later Catholic period. [2040] There, and
in some other countries, it was the main merit of the Reformation to
carry on zealously the work so begun, setting up common schools in
every parish. In Lutheran Germany this work was for a long period much
more poorly done, as regarded the peasantry. These had been trodden
down after their revolt into a state of virtual slavery. "The broad
midlands and the entire eastern part of Germany were filled with
slaves, who had neither status nor property nor education"; [2041]
and it was long before any large number of the people were taught to
read and write, [2042] the schooling given at the best being a scanty
theological drill. [2043]
But indeed for two-thirds of its adherents everywhere the Reformation
meant no other reading than that of the Bible and catechisms and
theological treatises. Coming as it did within one or two generations
of the invention of printing, it stood not for new ideas, but for
the spread of old. That invention had for a time positively checked
the production of new books, the multiplication of the old having
in a measure turned attention to the past; [2044] and the diffusion
of the Bible in particular determined the mental attitude of the
movement in mass. The thinking of its more disinterested promoters
began and ended in Bibliolatry: Luther and Calvin alike did but
set up an infallible book and a local tyranny against an infallible
pope and a tyranny centring at Rome. Neither dreamt of toleration;
and Calvin, the more competent mind of the two, did but weld the
detached irrationalities of the current theology into a system which
crushed reason and stultified the morality in the name of which he
ruled Geneva with a rod of iron. [2045] It is remarkable that both
men reverted to the narrowest orthodoxies of the earlier Church, in
defiance of whatever spirit of reasonable inquiry had been on the
side of their movement. "It is a quality of faith," wrote Luther,
"that it wrings the neck of reason and strangles the beast"; [2046]
and he repeatedly avowed that it was only by submitting his mind
absolutely to the Scriptures that he could retain his faith. [2047]
"He despised reason as heartily as any papal dogmatist could despise
it. He hated the very thought of toleration or comprehension." [2048]
And when Calvin was combated by the Catholic Pighius on the question of
predestination and freewill, his defence was that he followed Christ
and the Apostles, while his opponents resorted to human thoughts and
reasonings. [2049] On the same principle he dealt with the Copernican
theory. After once breaking away from Rome both leaders became typical
anti-freethinkers, never even making Savonarola's pretence to resort
to rationalist methods, though of course not more anti-rationalist
than he. The more reasonable Zwingli, who tried to put an intelligible
aspect on one or two of the mysteries of the faith, was scouted by
both, as they scouted each other.
It is noteworthy that Zwingli, the most open-minded of the Reformers,
owed his relative enlightenment to his general humanist culture,
[2050] and in particular to the influence of Pico della Mirandola
and of Erasmus. It has even been argued that his whole theological
system is derived from Pico, [2051] but it appears to have been from
Erasmus that he drew his semi-rationalistic view of the eucharist,
[2052] a development of that of Berengar, representing it as
a simple commemoration. Such thinking was far from the "spirit
of the Reformation"; and Luther, after the Colloquy of Marburg
(1529), in which he and Melanchthon debated against Zwingli and
Oecolampadius, spoke of those "Sacramentarians" as "not only liars,
but the very incarnation of lying, deceit, and hypocrisy." [2053]
Zwingli's language is less ferocious; but it is confessed of him
that he too practised coercion against minorities in the case alike
of the Anabaptists and of the monasteries and nunneries, and even
in the establishment of his reformed eucharist. [2054] The expulsion
of the nuns of St. Katherinenthal in particular was an act of sheer
tyranny; and the outcome of the methods enforced by him at Zürich
was the bitter hostility of the five Forest Cantons, which remained
Catholic. In war with them he lost his life; and after his death
(1531) his sacramental doctrine rapidly disappeared from Swiss and
Continental Protestantism, [2055] even as it failed to make headway
in England. [2056] At his fall "the words of triumph and cursing used
by Lutherans and others were shameful and almost inhuman." [2057]
In the sequel, for sheer lack of a rational foundation, the other
Protestant sects in turn fell to furious dissension and persecution,
some apparently finding their sole bond of union in hatred of the rest.
See Menzel, Geschichte der Deutschen, 3te Aufl. Cap. 431, for a
sample of Lutheran popery; and as to the strifes cp. C. Beard, The
Reformation, as cited, pp. 182-83; Dunham, History of the Germanic
Empire, 1835, iii, 115-20, 153, 169; Strype, Memorials of Cranmer,
ed. 1848, iii, 155-62; A. F. Pollard, in "The Cambridge Modern
History," vol. ii, The Reformation, ch. viii, pp. 277-79. In the
last-cited compilation, however, the strifes of the Protestant
sects are barely indicated.
As to Luther's attitude towards new science, see his derision of
Copernicus, on scriptural grounds, in the Table Talk, ch. lxix,
Of Astronomy and Astrology. (The passage is omitted from
the English translation in the Bohn Library, p. 341; and the
whole chapter is dropped from the German abridgment published
by Reclam.) Melanchthon was equally unteachable, and actually
proposed to suppress the new teachings by punitive methods. (Initia
Doctrinæ Physicæ, cited by White, Warfare of Science and Theology,
1896, i, 127.) It has been loosely claimed for Luther that he was
"an enemy to religious persecution" (Lieber, Manual of Political
Ethics, 1839, pt. i, p. 329), when the only evidence offered is
(id. p. 205) that he declared against killing for heresy, because
innocent men were likely to be slain--"Quare nullo modo possum
admittere, falsos doctores occidi." As early as 1524, renouncing
his previous doctrine of non-coercion, he invoked the intervention
of the State to punish blasphemy, declaring that the power of the
sword was given by God for such ends (Bezold, p. 563). Melanchthon
too declared that "Our commands are mere Platonic laws when the
civil power does not give its support" (id. p. 565).
A certain intellectual illusion is set up even by Bezold when he
writes that in Luther's resort to physical force "the hierarchical
principle had triumphed over one of the noblest principles of the
Reformation." "The Reformation" had no specific principles. Among
its promoters were professed all manner of principles. The
Reformation was the outcome of all their activities, and to make
of it an entity or even a distinct set of theories is to obscure
the phenomena.
Such flaws of formulation, however, are trifling in comparison
with the mis-statement of the historic fact which is still normal
in academic as in popular accounts of the Reformation. It would
be difficult, for instance, to give seriously a more misleading
account of the Lutheran reformation than the proposition of
Dr. Edward Caird that, "in thrusting aside the claim of the
Church to place itself between the individual and God, Luther
had proclaimed the emancipation of men not only from the leading
strings of the Church, but, in effect, from all external authority
whatever, and even, in a sense, from all merely external teaching
or revelation of the truth" (Hegel, 1883, p. 18). Luther thrust
his own Church precisely where the Catholic Church had been;
bitterly denounced new heresies; and put the Bible determinedly
"between the individual and God." In Luther's own day Sebastian
Franck unanswerably accused him of setting up a paper pope in place
of the human pope he had rejected. Luther's declaration was that
"the ungodly papists prefer the authority of the Church far above
God's Word, a blasphemy abominable and not to be endured, wherewith
... they spit in God's face. Truly God's patience is exceeding
great, in that they be not destroyed" (Table Talk, ch. i).
Another misconception is set up by Pattison, who seems to have been
much concerned to shield Calvin from the criticism of the civilized
conscience (see below, p. 452). He pronounces that Calvin's "great
merit lies in his comparative neglect of dogma. He seized the idea
of reformation as a real renovation of human character" (Essays,
ii, 23). If so, the reformer can have had little satisfaction,
for he never admitted having regenerated Geneva. But the claim
that he "comparatively" neglected dogma is true only in the sense
that he was more inquisitorially zealous about certain forms of
private conduct than was Luther. Gruet, indeed, he helped to
slay upon political charges, taking a savage vengeance upon a
personal opponent. But even in Gruet's case he sought later to
add a religious justification to his crime. And it was in the
name of dogma that he put Servetus to death, exiled Castalio,
imprisoned Bolsec, broke with old friends, and imperilled the
entire Genevan polity. Pattison's praise would be much more
appropriate to Zwingli.
Luther, though he would probably have been ready enough to punish
Copernicus as a heretic, was saved the evil chance which befel
Calvin of being put in a place of authority where he could in God's
name commit judicial murder. It is by acts so describable that
the name of Calvin is most directly connected with the history of
freethought. In nowise entitled to rank with its furtherers, he is
to be enrolled in the evil catalogue of its persecutors. In the case
of Jacques Gruet on a mixture of political and religious charges,
in that of Michael Servetus on grounds of dogma pure and simple, he
cast upon the record of Genevan Protestantism and upon his own memory
an ineffaceable stain of blood. Gruet, an adherent of the Perrinist
faction of Geneva, a party opposed to Calvin, on being arrested for
issuing a placard against the clerical junto in power, was found,
by the accounts of the Calvinist historians, to have among his papers
some revealing his disbelief in the Christian religion. [2058] This,
however, proves to be a partisan account of the matter, and is hardly
even in intention truthful. In the first place, it was admitted by
Calvin that the placard, affixed by night to the chair of St. Peter
in Geneva, was not in Gruet's handwriting; yet he was arrested,
imprisoned, and put to the torture with the avowed object of making
him confess "that he had acted at the instigation of François Favre,
of the wife of Perrin, and of other accomplices of the same party whom
he must have had." Perrin was the former Captain-General of Geneva,
a popular personage, opposed to Calvin and detested by him. No match
for the vigilant Reformer, Perrin had been through Calvin's intrigues
deprived of his post; and there was a standing feud between his
friends and the Calvinistic party in power.
The main part of the charges against Gruet was political; and the
most circumstantial was based upon a draft, found among his papers,
of a speech which he had ostensibly proposed to make in the General
Council calling for reform of abuses. The speech contained nothing
seditious, but the intention to deliver it without official permission
was described as lèse-majesté--a term now newly introduced into
Genevan procedure. The other documentary proofs were trivial. In
one fragment of a letter there was an ironical mention of "notre
galant Calvin"; and in a note on a margin of Calvin's book against
the Anabaptists he had written in Latin "All trifles." For the rest,
he was accused of writing two pages in Latin "in which are comprised
several errors," and of being "inclined (plutôt enclin) to say,
recite and write false opinions and errors as to the true words of
Our Saviour." [2059] Concerning his errors the only documentary proof
preserved is from an alleged scrap of his writing in corrupt Latin,
cited by Calvin as a sample of his inability to write Latin correctly:
Omnes tam humane quam divine que dicantur leges factae sunt ad placitum
hominum, which may be rendered, "All so-called laws, divine as well
as human, are made at the will of men." In the act of sentence, he is
declared further to have written obscene verses justifying free love;
to have striven to ruin the authority of the consistory, menaced the
ministers, and abused Calvin; and to have "conspired with the king
of France against the safety of Calvin and the State."
To make out these charges, for the last of which there seems to be
no evidence whatever, Gruet was put to the torture many times during
many days "according to the manner of the time," says one of Calvin's
biographers. [2060] In reality such unmeasured use of torture was
in Geneva a Calvinistic innovation. Gruet, refusing under the worst
stress of torture to incriminate anyone else, at length, in order to
end it, pleaded guilty to the charges against him, praying in his
last extremity for a speedy death. On July 26, 1547, his half-dead
body was beheaded on the scaffold, the torso being tied and the
feet nailed thereto. Such were the judicial methods and mercies of
a reformed Christianity, guided by a chief reformer.
The biographer Henry "cannot repress a sigh" over the thirty
days of double torture of Gruet (ii, 66), but goes on to make a
most disingenuous defence of Calvin, first asserting that he was
not responsible, and then arguing that it would be as unjust to
try Calvin by modern standards as to blame him for not wearing a
perruque à la Louis XIV, or proceeding by the Code Napoléon! The
same moralist declares (p. 68) that "it is really inspiriting to
hear how Calvin stormed in his sermons against the opposite party":
and is profoundly impressed by the "deep religious earnestness"
with which Calvin in 1550 claimed that "The council ought again
to declare aloud that this blasphemer has been justly condemned,
that the wrath of God may be averted from the city." Finally
(p. 69), recording how Gruet's "book" was burned in 1550, the
biographer pronounces that "The Gospel thus gained a victory over
its enemies; in the same manner as in Germany freedom triumphed
when Luther burnt the pope's bull."
As to the alleged anti-religious writings of Gruet, they were not
produced or even specified till 1550, three years after his execution,
when they were said to have been found partly in the roof of what
had been his house (now occupied by the secretary of the consistory),
partly behind a chimney, and partly in a dustbin. Put together, they
amounted to thirteen leaves, in a handwriting which was declared by
Calvin to be "juridically, by good examination of trustworthy men,
recognized to be that of Gruet." The time and the singular manner of
their discovery raises the question whether the papers had not been
placed by the finders. The execution of Gruet, the first bloodshed
under Calvin's régime, had roused new hatred against him; the slain
man figured as a martyr in the eyes of the party to which he belonged;
and it had become necessary to discredit him and them if the ascendancy
of Calvin was to be secure. It is solely upon Calvin's account that
we have to depend for our knowledge of Gruet's alleged anti-Christian
doctrine; for the document, after being described and condemned, was
duly burned by the common hangman. If genuine, it was a remarkable
performance. According to the act of condemnation, which is in the
handwriting of Calvin, it derided all religions alike, blasphemed
God, Jesus, the Holy Ghost, the Virgin Mary, Moses, the Patriarchs,
the Prophets, the Apostles, the disciples, the gospels, the Old and
New Testaments, the gospel miracles, and the resurrection. [2061]
Not a single phrase is quoted; we have mere general description,
execration, and sentence.
Whether the document was a planned forgery, or part of a copy by
Gruet of an anti-Christian treatise theretofore secretly circulated,
will never be known. The story of Gruet soon swelled into a
legend. According to one narrative, he had copied with his own hand and
circulated in Geneva the mysterious treatise, De Tribus Impostoribus,
the existence of which, at that period, is very doubtful. [2062]
On the strength of this and other cases [2063] the Libertines have
been sometimes supposed to be generally unbelievers; but there is
no more evidence for this than for the general ascription to them
of licentious conduct. It appears certain indeed that at that time
the name Libertine was not recognized as a label for all of Calvin's
political opponents, but was properly reserved for the sect so-called;
[2064] but even a vindicator of Calvin admits that "it is undeniable
that the Libertines [i.e. the political opponents of Calvin, so-called
by modern writers] of 1555 were the true political representatives of
the patriots of 1530." [2065] The presumption is that the political
opposition included the more honest and courageous men of liberal and
tolerant tendencies, as Calvin's own following included men of "free"
life. [2066] The really antinomian Libertini of the period were to
be found among the pantheistic-Christian sect or school so-called,
otherwise known as Spirituals, who seem to have been a branch of
the Brethren of the Free Spirit, or fraternity of the "Spirit of
Liberty." These Calvin denounced in his manner; but in 1544 he had also
forced into exile his former friend, Sebastian Castalio (or Castalion;
properly Chatillon), master of the public school at Geneva, for simply
rejecting his doctrine of absolute predestination, striving to have him
driven in turn from Basel; and in 1551 he had caused to be imprisoned
and banished a physician and ex-Carmelite, Jerome Bolsec, for publicly
denying the same dogma. Bolsec, being prevented by Calvin's means
from settling in any neighbouring Protestant community, returned to
Catholicism, [2067] as did many others. After Calvin's death Bolsec
took his revenge in an attack on the reformer in his public and
private character, [2068] which has been treated as untrustworthy
by the more moderate Catholic scholars who deal with the period;
[2069] and which, as regards its account of his private morals, is
probably on all fours with Calvin's own unscrupulous charges against
the "Libertines" and others who opposed him.
The tenets of the Libertini are somewhat mystifying, as handled
by Calvin and his biographer Henry, both alike animated by
the odium theologicum in the highest degree. By Calvin's own
account they were mystical Christians, speaking of Christ as "the
spirit which is in the world and in us all," and of the devil
and his angels as having no proper existence, being identical
with the world and sin. Further, they denied the eternity of
the human soul and the freedom of the will; and Calvin charges
them with subverting alike belief in God and morality (Henry,
Life of Calvin, Eng. tr. ii, 45-46). The last charge could
just as validly be brought against his own predestinarianism;
and as regards ethics we find Calvin alternately denouncing the
Libertines for treating all sin as unpardonable, and for stating
that in Christ none could sin. Apparently he gives his inferences
as their doctrines; and the antinomianism which, in the case of
the trial of Madame Ameaux, Henry identifies with pantheism, was
by his own showing of a Christian cast. Little credit, accordingly,
can be given to his summing up that among the Libertines of Geneva
there exhibited itself "a perfectly-formed anti-Christianity,"
which he calls "a true offspring of hell" (ii, 49). The residuum
of truth appears to be that in the pantheism of this sect,
as Neander says concerning the Brethren of the Free Spirit
among the Beghards, there were "the foretokens of a thoroughly
anti-Christian tendency, hostile to everything supernatural, every
sentiment of a God above the world; a tendency which contained
... the germ of absolute rationalism" (Hist. of the Chr. Church,
Torrey's tr. ix, 536). Pantheism, logically extended, obviously
reduces the supernatural and the natural to unity, and is thus
atheistic. But that the pantheists of Geneva in Calvin's day
reached logical consistency is incredible. The Libertine sect,
in all likelihood, was only partially antinomian, and only in
very small part consciously anti-Christian.
At this period (1552), on the same issue of predestination, Calvin
broke utterly with one of his closest friends, Jacques de Bourgogne,
Sieur de Falais. [2070] It seemed as if the Protestant polity
were disrupting in a continuous convulsion of dogmatic strife; and
Melanchthon wrote to Bucer in despair over the madness and misery of
a time in which Geneva was returning to the fatalism of the Stoics,
and imprisoning whosoever would not agree with Zeno. [2071] By this
time it must have been clear to some that behind the strifes of
raging theologians there lay a philosophic problem which they could
not sound. It is therefore not surprising to learn that already Basel
University, as fifty years before at Erfurt, there was a latitudinarian
group of professors who aimed at a universal religion, and came near
"naturalism" in the attempt; [2072] while elsewhere in Switzerland,
as we shall see later, there grew up the still freer way of thought
which came to be known as Deism.
A great impulse to that development, as well as to simple Unitarianism,
must have been given by the execution of Michael Servetus. [2073]
That ill-starred heretic, born of Spanish stock in France, brought
to the propaganda of Unitarianism, of which he may be reckoned the
inaugurator, a determination as strong as Calvin's own. Sent by his
father to study civil law at Toulouse, he began there to study the
Bible, doubtless under the stimulus of the early Protestant discussions
of the time. The result was a prompt advance beyond the Protestant
standpoint. Leaving Toulouse after two or three years' residence, he
visited Bologna and Augsburg in the train of the confessor of Charles
V. Thereafter he visited Lyons and Geneva, and had some intercourse
with Oecolampadius at Basel, where he put in the hands of a bookseller
the signed manuscript of his first book, De Trinitatis erroribus libri
septem. The bookseller sent it on to Hagenau, in Alsace, which as an
"imperial city" seems to have had special freedom in the matter of
book-publishing; and thither, after visiting Bucer and Capito at
Strasburg, Servetus went to have it printed in 1531. [2074] In this
treatise, produced in his twenty-first year, he definitely rejects
Trinitarianism, while putting somewhat obscurely his own idea of
the nature of Jesus Christ--whom, it should be noted, he held in
high reverence. In the following year he produced at the same place
another small treatise, Dialogorum de Trinitate libri duo, wherein
he recasts his first work, "retracting" it and apologizing for its
crudity, but standing substantially to its positions. It was not
till 1553 that he printed at Vienne in Dauphiné, without his name,
his Christianismi Restitutio. [2075] In the interval he had been
doing scientific work as an editor of Ptolemy (1535, Lyons), and as a
student of and lecturer on anatomy and medicine at Paris, where (1536)
he met Calvin on his last visit to France. In 1538 he is found studying
at Louvain; and, after practising medicine at Avignon and Charlieu,
he again studies medicine at Montpellier. The Archbishop of Vienne,
who had heard him lecture at Paris, established him at Vienne as his
confidential physician (1541-53), and there it was that he produced
the book for which he died. About 1545-46 he had rashly written to
Calvin, sending him the MS. of the much-expanded recast of his books
which later appeared as the Restitutio. Calvin sent a hostile reply,
and on the same day wrote to Farel: "If he come, and my influence can
avail, I shall not suffer him to depart alive." Servetus had denounced
the papacy as fiercely as any Protestant could wish, yet his heresy on
the question of the Trinity [2076] was enough to doom him to instant
death at Calvin's hands. Servetus could not get back his MS., and
wrote to a friend about 1547 that he felt sure the affair would bring
him to his death. [2077] When in 1552-53 he had the book privately
printed at Vienne, and the bulk of the edition was sent to Lyons and
Frankfort, the toils closed around him, the ecclesiastical authorities
at Lyons being apprised of the facts by de Trie, a Genevan Protestant,
formerly of Lyons. The whole Protestant world, in fact, was of one
opinion in desiring to suppress Servetus's anti-Trinitarian books,
and the wonder is that he had so long escaped both Protestant and
Catholic fury. Luther had called his first book horribly wicked; and
Melanchthon, who in 1533 foresaw from the second much dangerous debate,
wrote in 1539 to the Venetian Senate to warn them against letting
either be sold. [2078] It is significant of the random character of
Protestant as of Catholic thought that Servetus, like Melanchthon,
was a convinced believer in astrology, [2079] while Luther on Biblical
grounds rejected astrology and the Copernican astronomy alike, and
held devoutly by the belief in witchcraft. The superiority of Servetus
consists in his real scientific work--he having in part given out the
true doctrine of the circulation of the blood [2080]--and his objection
to all persecution of heresy. [2081] Philosophically, he was more than
a mere Scripturist. Though pantheism was not charged upon him, we have
Calvin's testimony that he propounded it in the strongest form. [2082]
Calvin's guilt in the matter begins with his devices to have
Servetus seized by the Catholic authorities of Lyons [2083]--to set
misbelievers, as he regarded them, to slay the misbeliever--and his
use of Servetus's confidential letters against him. [2084] He was
not repelling a heresy from his own city, but heretic-hunting far
away in sheer malignity. The Catholics were the less cruel gaolers,
and let their prisoner escape, condemning him to death at Vienne
in absence. After some months of wandering he had the temerity to
seek to pass into Italy by way of Geneva, and was there at length
recognized, and arrested. After a long trial he was sentenced to be
burned alive (Oct. 27, 1553). The trial at Geneva is a classic document
in the records of the cruelties committed in honour of chimeras; and
Calvin's part is the sufficient proof that the Protestant could hold
his own with the Catholic Inquisitor in the spirit of hate. [2085]
It has been urged, in his excuse, that the doctrines of Servetus were
blasphemously put; but in point of fact Calvin passed some of his
bitterest denunciation on the statement, cited (from Lorenz Friese)
in a note in Servetus's edition of Ptolemy's Geography, that Judea is
actually a barren and meagre country, and not "flowing with milk and
honey." Despite the citation of ample proof, and the plea that the
passage was drawn from a previous edition, it was by Calvin adjudged
blasphemous in that it "necessarily inculpated Moses and grievously
outraged the Holy Spirit." [2086] The language of Calvin against
Servetus at this point is utterly furious. Had Servetus chanced to
maintain the doctrine of the earth's motion, he would certainly have
been adjudged a blasphemer on that score also; for in the Argument
to his Commentary on Genesis (1563) Calvin doggedly maintains the
Ptolemaic theory. His language tells of much private freethinking
around him on the Mosaic doctrine, and his tone leaves no doubt as
to how he would treat published heresy on that theme. The audacity of
Servetus in suggesting that the 53rd chapter of Isaiah had historical
reference to Cyrus is for him anathema. [2087]
Even before this hideous episode, Calvin's passion of malevolence
against his theological opponents in his own sect is such as to
shock some of his adoring biographers. [2088] All the Protestant
leaders, broadly speaking, grew more intolerant as they grew in
years--a fair test as between the spirit of dogma and the spirit of
freethought. Calvin had begun by pleading for tolerance and clemency;
Luther, beginning as a humanitarian, soon came to be capable
of hounding on the German nobility against the unhappy peasants;
Melanchthon, tolerant in his earlier days, applauded the burning of
Servetus; [2089] Beza laboriously defended the act. Erasmus stood
for tolerance; and Luther accordingly called him godless, an enemy
of true religion, a slanderer of Christ, a Lucian, an Epicurean, and
(by implication) the greatest knave alive. [2090]
The burning of Servetus in 1553, however, marked a turning point in
Protestant theological practice on the Continent. There were still
to come the desperate religious wars in France, in which more than
300,000 houses were destroyed, abominable savageries were committed,
and all civilization was thrown back, both materially and morally;
and there was yet to come the still more appalling calamity of the
Thirty Years' War in Germany--a result of the unstable political
conditions set up at the Reformation; but theological human sacrifices
were rapidly discredited. Servetus was not the first victim, but he
was nearly the last.
The jurist Matthieu Gripaldi (or Gribaldo) lectured on law at
Toulouse, Cahors, Valence, and Padua successively, and, finding his
anti-Trinitarian leanings everywhere a source of danger to him, had
sought a retreat at Fargias near Geneva, then in the jurisdiction
of Berne. Venturing to remonstrate with Calvin against the sentence
on Servetus, he brought upon himself the angry scrutiny of the
heretic-hunter, and was banished from the neighbourhood. For a time
he found refuge in a new professorship at Tübingen; but there too the
alarm was raised, and he was expelled. Coming back to Fargias, he gave
refuge to the heretic Valentinus Gentilis on his escape from Geneva;
and again Calvin attacked him, delivering him to the authorities of
Berne. An abjuration saved him for the time; but he would probably
have met the martyr's fate in time had not his death by the plague,
in 1564, guaranteed him, as Bayle remarks, against any further trial
for heresy. [2091]
The effect of theological bias on moral judgment is
interestingly exemplified in the comment of Mosheim on the case
of Servetus. Unable to refer to the beliefs of deists or atheists
without vituperation, Mosheim finds it necessary to add to his
account of Servetus as a highly-gifted and very learned man the
qualification: "Yet he laboured under no small moral defects,
for he was beyond all measure arrogant, and at the same time
ill-tempered, contentious, unyielding, and a semi-fanatic." Every
one of these characterizations is applicable in the highest
degree to Calvin, and in a large degree to Luther; yet for them
the historian has not a word of blame.
Even among rationalists it has not been uncommon to make light
of Calvin's crimes on the score that his energy maintained a
polity which alone sustained Protestantism against the Catholic
Reaction. This is the verdict of Michelet: "The Renaissance,
betrayed by the accident of the mobilities of France, turning
to the wind of light volitions, would assuredly have perished,
and the world would have fallen into the great net of the fishers
of men, but for that supreme concentration of the Reformation on
the rock of Geneva by the bitter genius of Calvin." And again:
"Against the immense and darksome net into which Europe fell by the
abandonment of France nothing less than this heroic seminary could
avail" (Hist. de France, vol. x, La Réforme: end of pref. and end
of vol.). Though this verdict has been accepted by such critical
thinkers as Pattison (Essays, ii, 30-32) and Lord Morley (Romanes
Lecture on Machiavelli, 1877, p. 47), it is difficult to find
for it any justification in history.
The nature of the proposition is indeed far from clear. Michelet
appears to mean that Geneva saved Europe as constituting a
political rallying-point, a nucleus for Protestantism. Pattison,
pronouncing that "Calvinism saved Europe" (Essays, ii, 32),
explains that it was by "a positive education of the individual
soul"; and that "this, and this alone, enabled the Reformation to
make head against the terrible repressive forces brought to bear
by Spain--the Inquisition and the Jesuits" (p. 32). The thesis
thus vanishes in rhetoric, for it is quite impossible to give
such a formula any significance in the light of the history of
Protestantism in Britain, Scandinavia, Germany, and Holland. It
implies that where Protestantism finally failed--as in Italy,
France, Bohemia, Hungary, Poland, Belgium, parts of Germany,
and parts of Switzerland--it was because the individual spirit
had not been educated enough, which is a mere omission to note
the real economic and political causation. Neither Michelet nor
Pattison had any scientific notion of the nature of the process.
If we revert to Michelet's claim, we get no more satisfaction. The
very fact that Calvin's polity could subsist without any special
military protection is the proof that it could have subsisted
without the gross cruelty and systematic persecution which marked
it out from the rest of the world, making Geneva "a kind of frozen
hell of austerity and retribution and secret sin." To say otherwise
is to say that freedom and toleration are less attractive to men
than ferocity, tyranny, and gloom. Calvin drove many men back to
Catholicism, and had his full share in the mortal schism which
set Calvinists and Lutherans at daggers drawn for a century,
while Catholicism re-conquered Poland and Bohemia and Hungary,
held France, and nearly re-conquered Lutheran Germany. There
is no reason to suppose that the Reformation would have gone
otherwise in Britain, Scandinavia, and Holland had Geneva gone as
far in tolerance as it actually did in intolerance. To call it,
as Michelet does, an "asylum," in view of Calvin's expulsion or
execution of every man who dared to differ from him, is courageous.
At the close of his argument (p. 41) Pattison sums up that,
"Greatly as the Calvinistic Churches have served the cause of
political liberty, they have contributed nothing to the cause of
knowledge." The admission is in the main valid; but the claim will
not stand, unless "political liberty" is to be newly defined. The
Calvinistic rule at Geneva was from the first a class tyranny,
which became more and more narrow in its social basis. The
Calvinist clergy and populace of Holland turned their backs on
republican institutions, and became violent monarchists. The
Calvinists of England and Scotland were as determined persecutors
as ever lived. And, indeed, how should liberty anywhere flourish
when knowledge is trodden under foot?
The treatment of Bernardino Ochino, who had turned Protestant after
being vicar-general of the Capuchin order, shows the slackening of
ferocity after the end of Servetus. Ochino in a late writing ventured
guardedly to suggest certain relaxations of the law of monogamy--a
point on which some Lutherans went much further than he--and
was besides mildly heretical about the Trinity. [2092] He was in
consequence expelled with his family from the canton of Zürich (1563),
at the age of seventy-six. Finding Switzerland wholly inhospitable,
and being driven by the Catholics from Poland, where he had sought
to join the Socinians, he went to die in Moravia. [2093] This was no
worse treatment than Lutherans and Calvinists normally meted out to
each other; [2094] and several of the Italian Protestants settled at
Geneva who leant to Unitarian views--among them Gribaldo, Biandrata,
and Alciati--found it prudent to leave that fortress of orthodoxy,
where they were open to official challenge. [2095] Finally, when
the Italian Valentinus Gentilis, or Gentile, the anti-Trinitarian,
variously described as Tritheist, Deist, and Arian, uttered his
heresies at Geneva, he contrived, after an imprisonment, a forced
recantation, and a public degradation (1558), to escape thence with
his life, but was duly beheaded at Berne in 1566, refusing this time
to recant. [2096]
This ends the main Swiss era of theological murder; but a century
was to pass before sectarian hatreds subsided, or the spirit of
persecution was brought under control of civilization. In 1632, indeed,
a Protestant minister, Nicholas Anthoine, was burned at Geneva on
the charge of apostasy to Judaism. As he had been admittedly insane
for a time, and had repeatedly shown much mental excitement, [2097]
his execution tells of a spirit of cruelty worthy of the generation
of Calvin. The Protestant Bibliolatry, in short, was as truly the
practical negation of freethought and tolerance as was Catholicism
itself; and it was only their general remoteness from each other
that kept the different reformed communities from absolute war where
they were not, as in Switzerland, held in check by the dangers around
them. [2098] As it was, they had their full share in the responsibility
for the furious civil wars which so long convulsed France, and for
those which ultimately reduced Germany to the verge of destruction,
arresting her civilization for over a hundred years.
To sum up. In Germany Protestantism failed alike as a moral and
as an intellectual reform. The lack of any general moral motive in
the ecclesiastical revolution is sufficiently proved by the general
dissolution of conduct which, on the express admission of Luther,
followed upon it. [2099] This was quite apart from the special
disorders of the Anabaptist movement, which, on the other hand,
contained elements of moral and religious rationalism, as against
Bibliolatry, that have been little recognized. [2100] Of that movement
the summing-up is that, like the Lutheran, it turned to evil because
of sheer lack of rationalism. Among its earlier leaders were men
such as Denk, morally and temperamentally on a higher plane than any
of the Lutherans. But Anabaptism too was fundamentally scriptural
and revelationist, not rational; and it miscarried in its own way
even more hopelessly than the theological "reform." Lutheranism,
renouncing the rational and ethical hope of social betterment, ran
to insane dissension over irrational dogma; Anabaptism, ignorantly
attaching the hope of social betterment to religious delusion,
ran to irrational social schemes, ending in anarchy, massacre, and
extinction. But the Lutheran failure was intellectually and morally
no less complete. Luther was with good reason ill at ease about his
cause when he died in 1546; and Melanchthon, dying in 1560, declared
himself glad to be set free from the rabies theologorum. [2101]
The test of the new regimen lay, if anywhere, in the University of
Wittemberg; and there matters were no better than anywhere else. [2102]
German university life in general went from bad to worse till a
new culture began slowly to germinate after the Thirty Years' War;
[2103] and the germs came mainly from the neighbouring nations. German
Switzerland exhibited similar symptoms, the Reformation being followed
by no free intellectual life, but by a tyranny identical in spirit
and method with that of Rome. [2104] It rests, finally, on the express
testimony of leading Reformers that the main effect of the Reformation
in the intellectual life of Germany was to discredit all disinterested
learning and literature. Melanchthon in particular, writing at dates
as far apart as 1522 and 1557, repeatedly and emphatically testifies
to the utter disregard of erudition and science in the interests
of pietism, corroborating everything said to the same effect by
Erasmus. [2105]
On the social and political side the rule of the Protestant princes
was not only as tyrannous but as indecorous as that of their
Catholic days, each playing pope in his own dominions; [2106] and
their clergy were not in a position to correct them. Menzel notes
that the normal drunkenness of the Protestant aristocracy at this
period made current in Europe the expression "a German swine." And
whereas Germany before the Reformation was at various points a culture
force for Europe--whence the readiness in other nations at first to
follow the Lutheran lead--it progressively became more and more of an
object-lesson of the evils of heresy, thus fatally weakening the cause
of Protestantism in France, where its fortunes hung in the balance.
Even in the matter of theology, Protestantism did not hold its own
against Catholic criticism. Both began by discriminating in the
scriptural canon, rejecting some books and depreciating others,
all the while professing to make the Word of God their sole or
final standard. When the Catholics pressed the demand as to how
they could settle what was the true Word of God, their followers
and successors could make no answer, and had to fall back on an
indiscriminate acceptance of the Canon. Again, Luther and Calvin
alike maintained the doctrine of "Assurance," and this was one
of the points in Calvinism accepted by Arminius. The Catholics,
naturally making the most of the admitted increase of sexual and
other licence in Germany and elsewhere under Lutheranism, dwelt upon
Luther's predestinarianism in general, and the doctrine of Assurance
in particular, as the source of the demoralization; and at the Council
of Trent it was expressly condemned. Thereafter, though it was "part
and parcel of the Confessions of all the Churches of the Reformation
down to the Westminster Assembly," it was in the last-named conclave
(1643) declared not to be of the essence of faith; and the Scottish
General Assembly subsequently deposed and condemned holders of this,
the original Protestant doctrine. Similar modifications took place
elsewhere. Thus the Protestant world drifted back to a Catholic
position, affirmed at the Council of Trent against Protestantism;
[2107] and in Holland we shall see, in the rise of Arminianism,
a similar surrender on the Protestant side to the general pressure
of Catholicism upon the ethical weaknesses of Predestinarianism. On
that point, however, the original Catholic doctrine of predestination
was revived by the Spanish Jesuit Luis Molina (1535-1600; not to be
confused with the later Quietist, Miguel de Molinos), who in his
treatise Liberi Arbitrii concordia cum gratiæ donis (1588) set it
forth as consequent upon God's foreknowledge of man's free use of his
will. As a result of the dispute between the Thomists and Molina's
followers, known as the Molinists, the Pope in 1607 pronounced that
the views of both sides were permissible--a course which had already
been taken twenty years before with the controversy on predestination
aroused by the doctrines of Michael Baius at the University of
Louvain. [2108] Thus the dissensions of Catholics in a manner kept
in countenance the divided Protestants; but the old confidence of
affirmation and formulation was inevitably sapped by the constant play
of controversy; and from this Protestantism necessarily suffered most.
Intellectually, there was visible retrogression in the Protestant
world. It is significant that throughout the sixteenth century most of
the great scientific thinkers and the freethinkers with the strongest
bent to new science lived in the Catholic world. Rabelais and Bruno
were priests; Copernicus a lay canon; Galileo had never withdrawn
from the Church which humiliated him; even Kepler returned to the
Catholic environment after professing Protestantism. He was in fact
excommunicated by the Tübingen Protestant authorities in 1612 [2109]
for condemning the Lutheran doctrine that the body of Christ could be
in several places at once. The immunity of such original spirits as
Gilbert and Harriott from active molestation is to be explained only
by the fact that they lived in the as yet un-Puritanized atmosphere
of Elizabethan England, before the age of Bibliolatry. It would
seem as if the spirit of Scripturalism, invading the very centres
of thought, were more fatal to original intellectual life than the
more external interferences of Catholic sacerdotalism. [2110] In
the phrase of Arnold, Protestantism turned the key on the spirit,
where Catholicism was normally content with an outward submission to
its ceremonies, and only in the most backward countries, as Spain,
destroyed entirely the atmosphere of free mental intercourse. It was
after a long reaction that Bruno and Galileo were arraigned at Rome.
The clerical resistance to new science, broadly speaking, was more
bitter in the Protestant world than in the Catholic; and it was merely
the relative lack of restraining power in the former that made possible
the later scientific progress. The history of Lutheranism upon this
side is an intellectual infamy. At Wittemberg, during Luther's life,
Reinhold did not dare to teach the Copernican astronomy; Rheticus
had to leave the place in order to be free to speak; and in 1571
the subject was put in the hands of Peucer, who taught that the
Copernican theory was absurd. Finally, the rector of the university,
Hensel, wrote a text-book for schools, entitled The Restored Mosaic
System of the World, showing with entire success that the new doctrine
was unscriptural. [2111] A little later the Lutheran superintendent,
Pfeiffer, of Lübeck, published his Pansophia Mosaica, insisting on the
literal truth of the entire Genesaic myth. [2112] In the next century
Calovius (1612-1686), who taught successively at Königsberg, Dantzic,
and Wittemberg, maintained the same position, contending that the
story of Joshua's staying the sun and moon refuted Copernicus. [2113]
When Pope Gregory XIII, following an impulse abnormal in his world,
took the bold step of rectifying the Calendar (1584), the Protestants
in Germany and Switzerland vehemently resisted the reform, and in some
cities would not tolerate it, [2114] thus refusing, on theological
grounds, the one species of co-operation with Catholicism that lay
open to them. And the anti-scientific attitude persisted for over
a century in Switzerland as in Scotland. At Geneva, J.-A. Turretin
(1671-1737), writing after Kepler and Newton had done their work,
laboriously repeated the demonstration of Calovius, and reaffirmed
the positions of Calvin. So far as its ministers could avail, the
Sacred Book was working the old effect.
§ 2. ENGLAND
Freethought gained permanently as little in England as elsewhere
in the process of substituting local tyranny for that of Rome. The
secularizing effect of the Reformation, indeed, was even more
marked there than elsewhere. What Wolsey had aimed at doing with
moderation and without revolution was done after him with violence
on motives of sheer plunder, and a multitude not only of monasteries
but of churches were disendowed and destroyed. The monastic churches
were often magnificent, and "when the monasteries were dissolved,
divine service altogether ceased in ninety out of every hundred of
these great churches, and the remaining ten were left ... without any
provision whatever" for public worship. [2115] All this must have had
a secularizing effect, which was accentuated by the changes in ritual;
and by the middle of the century it was common to treat both churches
and clergy with utter irreverence, which indeed the latter often
earned by their mode of life. [2116] Riots in churches, especially in
London, were common; there was in fact a habit of driving mules and
horses through them; [2117] and buying and selling and even gaming
were often carried on. But with all this there was no intellectual
enlightenment, and in high places there was no toleration. Under Henry
VIII anti-Romanist heretics were put to death on the old Romanist
principles. In 1532, again, was burned James Bainham, who not only
rejected the specially Catholic dogmas, but affirmed the possible
salvation of unbelievers.
Under the Protectorate which followed there was indeed much religious
semi-rationalism, evidently of continental derivation, which is
discussed in the theological literature of the time. Roger Hutchinson,
writing about 1550, repeatedly speaks of contemporary "Sadducees and
Libertines" who say (1) "that all spirits and angels are no substances,
but inspirations, affections, and qualities"; (2) "that the devil
is nothing but nolitum, or a filthy affection coming of the flesh";
(3) "that there is neither place of rest nor pain after this life;
that hell is nothing else but a tormenting and desperate conscience;
and that a joyful, quiet, and merry conscience is heaven."
See The Image of God, or Layman's Book, 1550, ch. xxiv: Parker
Society's rep. 1842, pp. 134, 138, 140. Cp. p. 79 and Sermon
II, on The Lord's Supper (id. p. 247), as to "Julianites" who
"do think mortal corpo, mortal anima." To the period 1550-60
is also assigned the undated work of John Veron, A Frutefull
Treatise of Predestination and of the Divine Providence of God,
with an Apology of the same against the swynishe gruntinge of
the Epicures and Atheystes of oure time. There was evidently a
good deal of new rationalism, which has been generally ignored
in English historiography. Its foreign source is suggested by
the use of the term "Libertines," which derives from France and
Geneva. See below, p. 473. The above-cited tenets are, in fact,
partly identical with those of the libertins denounced at Geneva
by Calvin.
Such doctrine, which we shall find in vogue fifty years later, cannot
have been printed, and probably can have been uttered only by men
of good status, as well as culture; and even by them only because of
the weakness of the State Church in its transition stage. Yet heresy
went still further among some of the sects set up by the Anabaptist
movement, which in England as in Germany involved some measure
of Unitarianism. A letter of Hooper to Bullinger in 1549 tells of
"libertines and wretches who are daring enough in their conventicles
not only to deny that Christ is the Messiah and Saviour of the world,
but also to call that blessed Seed a mischievous fellow and deceiver
of the world." [2118] This must have been said with locked doors, for
much milder heresy was heavily punished, the worst penalties falling
upon that which stood equally with orthodoxy on Biblical grounds.
In 1541, under Henry VIII, were burned three persons "because they
denied transubstantiation, and had not received the sacrament at
Easter." See the letter of Hilles to Bullinger, Original Letters,
as cited, i, 200. The case of Jean Bouchier or Bocher, burned in
1550, is well known. It is worth noting that the common charge
against Cranmer, of persuading the young king to sign her death
warrant, is false, being one of the myths of Foxe. The warrant
was passed by the whole Privy Council, Cranmer not being even
present. See the Parker Society's reprint of Roger Hutchinson,
1812, introd. pp. ii-5. Hutchinson apparently approved; and it
is significant of the clerical attitude of the time that he calls
(Image of God, ch. xxx, p. 201) for the punishment of Anabaptists
by death if necessary, but does not suggest it for "Sadducees
and Libertines."
The Elizabethan archbishops and the Puritans were equally intolerant;
and the idea of free inquiry was undreamt of. That there had been much
private discussion in clerical circles, however, is plain from the 13th
and 18th of the Thirty-nine Articles (1562), which repudiate natural
morality and hold "accursed" those who say that men can be saved
under any creed. [2119] This fulmination would not have occurred had
the heresy not been pressing; but the "curse" would thenceforth set
the key of clerical and public utterance. The Reformation, in fact,
speedily over-clouded with fanaticism what new light of freethought
had been glimmering before; turning into Bibliolaters those who had
rationally doubted some of the Catholic mysteries, and forcing back,
either into silence or, by reaction, into Catholic bigotry, those more
refined spirits who, like Sir Thomas More, had before been really
in advance of their age intellectually and morally, and desired a
transmutation of the old system rather than its overthrow. Nothing
so nearly rational as the Utopia (1515-16) appeared again in English
literature for a century; it is indeed, in some respects, a lead
to social science in our own day. More, with all his spontaneous
turn for pietism, had evidently drunk in his youth or prime [2120]
at some freethinking source, for his book recognizes the existence
of unbelievers in deity and immortality; and though he pronounces
them unfit for political power, as did Milton, Locke, and Voltaire
long after him, he stipulates that they be tolerated. [2121] Broadly
speaking, the book is simply deistic. "From a world," says a popular
historian, clerically trained--"from a world where fifteen hundred
years of Christian teaching had produced social injustice, religious
intolerance, and political tyranny, the humorist philosopher turns to a
'Nowhere' in which the efforts of mere natural human virtue realized
those ends of security, equality, brotherhood, and freedom, for which
the very institution of society seems to have been framed." [2122]
In his own case, however, we see the Nemesis of the sway of feeling
over judgment, for, beginning by keeping his prejudice above the
reason of whose teaching he is conscious, he ends by becoming a blind
religious polemist and a bitter persecutor.
Cp. Isaac Disraeli's essay, "The Psychological Character of Sir
Thomas More," in the Amenities of Literature, and the present
writer's essay, "Culture and Reaction," in Essays in Sociology,
vol. i. Lord Acton, vindicating More as against Wolsey, pleads
(Histor. Essays and Studies, 1907, p. 64) that More before his
death protested that no Protestant perished by his act. This seems
to be true in the bare sense that he did not exceed his ostensible
legal duties, and several times restrained the execution of the
law (Archdeacon Hutton, Sir Thomas More, 1895, pp. 215-22). But
the fact remains that More expressly justified and advocated the
burning of heretics as "lawful, necessary, and well done." Title of
ch. xiii of Dialogue, The Supper of the Lord. Cp. title of ch. xv.
It is in the wake, then, of the overthrow of Catholicism in the
second generation that a far-reaching freethought begins to be heard
of in England; and this clearly comes by way of new continental and
literary contact, which would have occurred in at least as great a
degree under Catholicism, save insofar as unbelief was facilitated by
the irreverence developed by the ecclesiastical revolution, or by the
state of indifference which among the upper classes was the natural
sequel of the shameless policy of plunder and the oscillation between
Protestant and Catholic forms. And it was finally in such negative
ways only that Protestantism furthered freethought anywhere.
§ 3. THE NETHERLANDS
Hardly more fortunate was the earlier course of things intellectual
after the Reformation in the Netherlands, where by the fifteenth
century remarkable progress had been made alike in science and the
arts, and where Erasmus acquired his culture and did his service to
culture's cause. The fact that Protestantism had to fight for its
life against Philip was of course not the fault of the Protestants;
and to that ruinous struggle is to be attributed the arrest of the
civilization of Flanders. But it lay in the nature of the Protestant
impulse that, apart from the classical culture which in Holland was
virtually a successful industry, providing editions for all Europe,
it should turn all intellectual life for generations into vain
controversy. The struggle between reform and popery was followed by
the struggle between Calvinism and Arminianism; and the second was
no less bitter if less bloody than the first, [2123] the religious
strife passing into civil feud.
The secret of the special bitterness of Calvinist resentment
towards the school of Arminius lay in the fact that the latter
endorsed some of the most galling of the Catholic criticisms of
Calvinism. Arminius [Latinized name of Jacob Harmensen or van Harmin,
1560-1609, professor of theology at Leyden] was personally a man of
great amiability, averse to controversy, but unable to reconcile the
Calvinist view of predestination with his own quasi-rational ethic,
and concerned to secure that the dogma should not be fastened upon
all Dutch Protestants. In his opinion, no effective answer could be
made on Calvinist lines to the argument of Cardinal Bellarmin [2124]
that from much Calvinist doctrine there flowed the consequences: "God
is the author of sin; God really sins; God is the only sinner; sin
is no sin at all." [2125] This was substantially true; and Arminius,
like Bellarmin, unable to see that the Calvinist position was simply
a logical reduction to moral absurdity of all theistic ethic, sought
safety in fresh dogmatic modifications. Of these the Calvinists, in
turn, could easily demonstrate the logical incoherence; and in a ring
of dilemmas from which there was no logical exit save into Naturalism
there arose an exacerbated strife, as of men jostling each other in a
prison where some saw their nominal friends in partial sympathy with
their deadly enemies, who jeered at their divisions.
The wonder is that the chaos of dispute and dogmatic tinkering which
followed did not more rapidly disintegrate faith. Calvinists sought
modifications under stress of dialectic, like their predecessors;
and the high "Supralapsarian" doctrine--the theory of the certain
regeneration or "perseverance" of "the saints"--shaded into
"the Creabilitarian opinion" [2126] and yet another; while the
"Sublapsarian" view claimed also to safeguard predestination. So long
as men remained in the primary Protestant temper, convinced that they
possessed in their Bibles an infallible revelation, such strife could
but generate new passion, even as it had done on the other irrational
problem of the eucharist. For men of sane and peaceful disposition,
the only modes of peace were resignation and doubt; and in the case
of the doubters the first intellectual movements would be either
back towards Rome [2127] or further on towards deism. The former
course would be taken by some who had winced under the jeers of the
Catholics; the latter by the hardier spirits who judged Catholicism for
themselves. As most of the fighting had been primed by and transacted
over texts, the surrender of the belief in an inspired scripture
greatly reduced the friction; and in Holland as elsewhere deism would
be thus spontaneously generated in the Protestant atmosphere. A few
went even further. "I have no doubt that many persons have secretly
revolted from the Reformed Church to the Papists," wrote Uitenbogaert
to Vorstius in 1613. "I firmly believe," he added, "that Atheism is
creeping by degrees into the minds of some." [2128]
Where mere Arminianism could bring Barneveldt to the block, even deism
could not be avowed; and generations had to pass before it could have
the semblance of a party; but the proof of the new vogue of unbelief
lies in the labour spent by Grotius (Hugo or Huig van Groot, 1583-1645)
on his treatise De Veritate Religionis Christianæ (1627)--a learned and
strenuous defence of the faith which had so lacerated his fatherland,
first through the long struggle with Spain, and again in the feud of
Arminians and Calvinists. When Barneveldt was put to death, Grotius had
been sentenced to imprisonment for life; and it was only after three
years of the dungeon that, by the famous stratagem of his wife, he
escaped in 1621. The fact that he devoted his freedom in France first
to his great treatise On the Law of War and Peace (1625), seeking to
humanize the civil life of the world, and next to his defence of the
Christian religion, is the proof of his magnanimity; but the spectacle
of his life must have done as much to set thinkers against the whole
creed as his apologetic did to reconcile them to it. He, the most
distinguished Dutch scholar and the chief apologist of Christianity in
his day, had to seek refuge, on his escape from prison, in Catholic
France, whose king granted him a pension. The circumstance which in
Holland chiefly favoured freethought, the freedom of the press, was,
like the great florescence of the arts in the seventeenth century,
a result of the whole social and political conditions, not of any
Protestant belief in free discussion. That there were freethinkers
in Holland in and before Grotius's time is implied in the pains he
took to defend Christianity; but that they existed in despite and not
by grace of the ruling Protestantism is proved by the fact that they
did not venture to publish their opinions. In France, doubtless, he
found as much unbelief as he had left behind. In the end, Grotius and
Casaubon alike recoiled from the narrow Protestantism around them,
which had so sadly failed to realize their hopes. [2129] "In 1642
Grotius had become wholly averse to the Reformation. He thought it
had done more harm than good"; and had he lived a few years longer
he would probably have become a Catholic. [2130]
§ 4. CONCLUSION
Thus concerning the Reformation generally "we are obliged to confess
that, especially in Germany, it soon parted company with free learning;
that it turned its back upon culture; that it lost itself in a maze
of arid theological controversy; that it held out no hand of welcome
to awakening science. Presently we shall see that the impulse to an
enlightened study and criticism of the Scriptures came chiefly from
heretical quarters; that the unbelieving Spinoza and the Arminian Le
Clerc pointed the way to investigations which the great Protestant
systematizers thought neither necessary nor useful. Even at a later
time it has been the divines who have most loudly declared their
allegiance to the theology of the Reformation who have also looked
most askance at science, and claimed for their statements an entire
independence of modern knowledge." [2131] In fine, "to look at
the Reformation by itself, to judge it only by its theological and
ecclesiastical development, is to pronounce it a failure"; and the
claim that "to consider it as part of a general movement of European
thought ... is at once to vindicate its past and to promise it the
future"--this amounts merely to avowing the same thing. Only as an
eddy in the movement of freethought is the Reformation intellectually
significant. Politically it is a great illustration of the potency
of economic forces.
While, however, the Reformation in itself thus did little for the
spirit of freethought, substituting as it did the arbitrary standard of
"revelation" for the not more arbitrary standard of papal authority,
it set up outside its own sphere some new movements of rational
doubt which must have counted for much in the succeeding period. It
was not merely that, as we shall see, the bloody strifes of the two
Churches, and the quarrels of the Protestant sects among themselves,
sickened many thoughtful men of the whole subject of theology; but that
the disputes between Romanists and anti-Romanists raised difficult
questions as to the bases of all kinds of belief. As always happens
when established beliefs are long attacked, the subtler spirits in the
conservative interest after a time begin putting in doubt beliefs of
every species; a method often successful with those who cannot carry
an argument to its logical conclusions, and who are thus led to seek
harbour in whatever credence is on the whole most convenient; but
one which puts stronger spirits on the reconsideration of all their
opinions. Thus we shall find, not only in the skepticism of Montaigne,
which is historically a product of the wars of religion in France,
but in the more systematic and more cautious argumentation of the
abler Protestants of the seventeenth century, a measure of general
rationalism much more favourable alike to natural science and to
Biblical and ethical criticism than had been the older environment
of authority and tradition, brutal sacerdotalism, and idolatrous
faith. Men continued to hate each other religiously for trifles,
to quarrel over gestures and vestures, and to wrangle endlessly over
worn-out dogmas; but withal new and vital heresies were set on foot;
new science generated new doubt; and under the shadow of the aging
tree of theology there began to appear the growths of a new era. As
Protestantism had come outside the "universal" Church, rearing its
own tabernacles, so freethought came outside both, scanning with a
deepened intentness the universe of things. And thus began a more vital
innovation than that dividing the Reformation from the Renaissance,
or even that dividing the Renaissance from the Middle Ages.