spirit and masculine character gave to him the front place, and drew
around him the less daring minds who were glad to have a leader to whom
to refer their doubts, and on whom their responsibility might partly
rest; yet Luther was but the exponent of a public sentiment which had
long been gaining strength, and which in any case would not have lacked
expression. In that great movement of the human mind he was not the
cause, but the instrument. Had his great opponent Erasmus enjoyed
the physical vigor and practical boldness of Luther, he would have
been handed down as the heresiarch of the sixteenth century.[1034] He,
too, had borne his full share in preparing the minds of men for what
was to come. The whole structure of sacerdotalism felt the blows of
his irreverential spirit, which boldly declared that the Scriptures
alone contained what was necessary to salvation.[1035] Theological
subtleties and priestly observances were alike useless or worse than
useless. For the living, it was idle to attend mass; for the dead, it
was folly to look to such a means for extrication from purgatory.[1036]
The confessional was to be visited only as a formal prerequisite to
partaking the Eucharist;[1037] pilgrimages and the veneration of
relics were ridiculed with a reckless freedom which showed that the
advance of enlightenment had utterly destroyed the reverence of the
past.[1038] Nothing, indeed, can give us a more thorough conviction
of the readiness of the public to welcome a radical change than the
wealth of indignant bitterness which Erasmus, himself a canon regular
and a priest, heaps upon all orders of the church, and the immense
applause which everywhere greeted his attacks. His sarcastic humor, his
biting satire, his exquisite ridicule, nowhere find a more congenial
subject than the vices of the monks, the priests, the prelates, the
cardinals, and even of the pope himself, until even Luther, as late as
1517, feels constrained to deplore that the evils which afflicted the
church should be thus exposed to derision.[1039] It affords a curious
illustration of the times to read those writings which a century
earlier would have consigned him to the dungeon or the stake, and to
reflect that he was not only the admiration of both the learned and the
vulgar of Europe, but also the petted protégé of king and kaisar, the
correspondent of popes, and finally the champion of the system which he
had so ruthlessly reviled, and which he never ceased to deplore.[1040]
The extraordinary favor with which his works were received by all
classes shows how fully he was justified in the indignation which he
so unsparingly lavished on clerical abuses, and how eagerly the public
appreciated one who could so well express that which was felt by all.
Equally significant was the popularity of the “Epistolæ Obscurorum
Virorum,” in which the learned wits of the new school poured forth upon
the clergy a broad and homely ridicule which exactly suited the taste
of the age;[1041] while Cornelius Agrippa more than rivalled Erasmus
in the wealth of vigorous denunciation with which he lashed the vices
of all the orders of ecclesiastics, from the pope to the béguine.[1042]
Not less indicative of the dangerous state of opinion was an address
delivered in the Diet held at Augsburg in 1518, when the legates of
Leo X. appealed to Germany for a tithe to assist in carrying on the
war against the Turk. The orator who replied to them did not restrain
his indignation at the deplorable condition of the church, which he
attributed solely to the worldly ambition of the popes. Since they had
united temporal with spiritual dominion—or, rather, since they had
allowed temporal interests to divert them wholly from their spiritual
duties—all had gone amiss. Christendom was despoiled from without,
and filled with tumult within. Religion was openly contemned; Christ
was daily bought and sold; the sheep were shorn, and the pastor took
no care of them. He did not even hesitate to charge, with emphasis
and at much detail, that the money extorted from Germany under pious
pretexts was squandered in Italy on the private quarrels and for
the aggrandizement of the papal houses, and those of the members
of the sacred college.[1043] All other nations were protected from
papal rapacity and tyranny by formal agreements. Germany alone was
surrendered defenceless, and not only were her bishops plundered but
even the smallest benefice could not be confirmed without the recipient
running the gauntlet of a horde of officials whose exactions forced him
to sell the very furniture of his church. As the rules of law and the
dictates of justice were equally disregarded, the popular sentiment
was becoming openly hostile to the church.[1044] A state of feeling
which dictated and permitted such a declaration from the supreme
representative body of the empire, when brought into collision with the
pretensions of the Holy See, now more exaggerated than ever, could have
but one result—Revolution.
With all this license Germany was still, by the force of circumstances,
less independent of the papacy than any other Tramontane power. What
was going on elsewhere in Europe may be guessed from the humiliating
conditions exacted in 1517 of Silvester Darius, the papal collector,
on his assuming the functions of his important office in England. He
bound himself by oath not to execute any letters or mandates of the
pope injurious to the king, the kingdom, or the laws; not to transmit
from England to Rome, without a special royal license, any gold, or
silver, or bills of exchange; not to leave the kingdom himself without
a special license under the great seal; with other less notable
restrictions, the practical effect of all being to place him and
his duties wholly under the control of the king.[1045] The position
of England had changed since the days of Innocent and John. Had the
dissensions of Germany permitted equal progress, Luther might perhaps
have only been known as an obscure but learned orthodox doctor, and
the inevitable revolt of half of Christendom have been postponed for a
century.
* * * * *
It is not my province to follow in detail the vicissitudes of the
Reformation, but only to indicate briefly its relations with sacerdotal
asceticism. Luther, at first, like Wickliffe and Huss, paid no
attention to the subject. In fact, when, on the 31st of October, 1217,
he nailed on the church door of Wittenberg his celebrated ninety-five
propositions, nothing was further from his expectations than to create
a heresy, a schism, or even a general reform in the church. He had
simply in view to vindicate his ideas on the subject of justification,
derived from St. Augustin, against the Thomist doctrines which had been
exaggerated into the monstrous abuses of Tetzel and his fellows.[1046]
In the general movement of the human mind at that period so much had
been said that was inimical to the received practices of the church,
without calling forth the thunders of Rome, that men seemed to think
the day of toleration had at last come. The hierarchy sat serenely
upon their thrones and in the confidence of unassailable power appeared
willing to allow any freedom of speculation which did not assail their
temporal privileges. Yet amid the general agitation and opposition
to Rome which pervaded society, it was impossible for a bold and
self-reliant spirit such as Luther’s not to advance step by step in a
career of which the ultimate goal was as little foreseen by himself
as by others. Still his progress was wonderfully slow. Even in 1519
he still considered himself within the pale of the church, and held
that no wrong committed by her could justify a separation or excuse
any resistance to the commands of a pope;[1047] and in the same year,
in a sermon on matrimony, he alluded not unfavorably to the life of
virginity.[1048] Events soon after forced him to further and more
dangerous innovations, yet when Leo X., in June, 1520, issued his
celebrated bull, “Exsurge Domine” to crush the rising heresy, in the
forty-one errors enumerated as taught by Luther, there is no allusion
to any doctrine specially inimical to ascetic celibacy.[1049]
This condemnation, followed as it was by the public burning of his
writings, aroused Luther to a more active and aggressive hostility
than he had previously manifested, In his book “De Captivitate
Babylonica Ecclesiæ” he attacked the sacrament of ordination, denied
that it separated the priest from his fellows, and ridiculed the
rule concerning digami, which excluded from the priesthood a man
who had been the husband of any but a virgin, while another who had
polluted himself with six hundred concubines was eligible to the
episcopate or papacy.[1050] Finally on Dec. 10th, 1520, he proclaimed
war to the knife by burning at Wittenberg the books of the canon law
and justifying this act by a manifesto recapitulating the damnable
doctrines contained in them. Among these he enumerates the prohibition
of sacerdotal marriage, as the origin and cause of excessive vice
and scandal.[1051] As he said himself, hitherto he had only been
playing at controversy with the Pope, but this was the beginning of
the tragedy.[1052] Soon after this, in a controversy with Ambrogio
Catarino, he stigmatized the rule of celibacy as angelical in
appearance, but devilish in reality, and invented by Satan as a fertile
source of sin and perdition.[1053]
In the mighty movement which was agitating men’s minds, Luther had been
anticipated in this. As early as 1518, a monk of Dantzic named James
Knade, abandoned his order, married, and publicly preached resistance
to Rome. It is evident that in this he had the support of the
people, for though he was imprisoned and tried by the ecclesiastical
authorities, the only punishment inflicted on him was banishment.[1054]
In the multitude of other questions more interesting to the immediate
disputants this point of discipline seems to have attracted but little
attention until 1521, when during Luther’s enforced seclusion in
Wartburg, Bartholomew Bernhardi, pastor of Kammerich, near Wittenberg,
put the heresiarch’s views into action in the most practical way by
obtaining the consent of his parish and celebrating his nuptials
with all due solemnity. Albert, Archbishop of Mainz and Magdeburg,
addressed to Frederic, Elector of Saxony, a demand for the rendition
of the culprit, which that prudent patron of the Reformation skilfully
eluded, and Bernhardi published a short defence or apology in which
he denounced the rule of celibacy as a “frivolam traditiunculam.” He
argued the matter, quoting the texts which since his time have been
generally employed in support of sacerdotal marriage; he referred
to Peter and Philip, Spiridon of Cyprus, and Hilary of Poitiers, as
examples of married bishops, quoted the story of Paphnutius, and relied
on the authority of the Greek church. This apparently did not satisfy
the archbishop, for Bernhardi felt obliged to address a second apology
to Frederic of Saxony, to whom he appealed for protection against
the displeasure of his ecclesiastical superiors.[1055] In spite of
molestation, he continued in the exercise of his priestly functions
until death. Less fortunate were his immediate imitators. A priest of
Mansfeld who took to himself a wife was thrown into prison at Halle
by the Archbishop of Mainz, and Jacob Siedeler, pastor of Glashütten,
in Misnia, who was guilty of the same crime, perished miserably in
the dungeon of Stolpen, to which he was committed by Duke George of
Saxony.[1056]
The enthusiastic Carlostadt, relieved for the time from the restraint
of Luther’s cooler wisdom, threw himself with zeal into this new
movement of reform, and lost no time in justifying it by a treatise
in which he argued strenuously in favor of priestly marriage, and
energetically denounced the monastic vows as idle and vain. Luther,
however, in his retreat, seems not yet prepared to take any very
decided position. In a letter of Jan. 17th, 1522, to Wolfgang Fabricius
Capito, one of the officials of the Archbishop of Mainz, he takes
the latter severely to task with respect to his action in a case of
the kind—probably that of the priest of Mansfeld alluded to above.
The man had been set at liberty, but forced to separate himself from
his wife, and Capito had defended himself on the ground that the
woman was a harlot. Luther asks him why he had been so earnest with a
single strumpet, when he had taken no action with so many under his
jurisdiction in Halberstadt, Mainz, and Magdeburg, and adds that when
the priest had acknowledged the woman as his wife there should have
been nothing further done. He proceeds to say, however, that he does
not ask for the freedom of sacerdotal marriage, and that he is not
prepared to take any general position concerning it, except that it
is lawful under God.[1057] Either with or without his approbation,
however, his friends lost no time in enforcing the new dogma which
they proclaimed to the world in the most authoritative manner. During
the same year Luther’s own Augustinian order held a provincial synod
at Wittenberg, in which they formally threw open the doors of the
monasteries, and permitted all who desired it to return to the world,
declaring that in Christ there was no distinction between Jew and
Greek, monk and layman, and that a vow in opposition to the gospel
was no vow, but an impiety. Ceremonies, observances, and dress were
pronounced futile; those who chose to abide by the established rule
were free to do so, but their preferences were not to be a law to their
fellows. Those who were fitted for preaching the word were advised to
depart; those who remained were obliged to perform the manual labor
which had been so prominent a portion of primæval Teutonic monasticism,
and mendicancy was strictly forbidden. In a few short and simple canons
a radical rebellion thus declared itself in the heart of an ancient and
powerful order, and principles were promulgated which were totally at
variance with sacerdotalism in all its protean forms.[1058]
This broad spirit of toleration did not suit the views of the more
progressive reformers. In Luther’s own Augustinian convent at
Wittenberg, one of his most zealous adherents, Gabriel Zwilling,
preached against monachism in general, taking the ground that salvation
required the renunciation of their vows by all who had been ensnared
into assuming the cowl; and so great was his success that thirteen
monks at once abandoned the convent. Yet even on Luther’s return to
Wittenberg, he at first took no part in the movement. He retained
his Augustinian habit, and continued his residence in the convent;
but before the close of the year (1522) he put forth his work, “De
Votis Monasticis,” in which he fully and finally adopted the views
of his friends, and showed himself as an uncompromising enemy of
monasticism.[1059] How difficult it was for him, however, to shake off
the habitudes in which he had been trained is shown by the fact that,
even at the end of 1523, he still sometimes preached in his cowl and
sometimes without it.[1060]
Notwithstanding the zealous opposition of the orthodox ecclesiastical
authorities, the doctrine and practice of Wittenberg were not long in
finding earnest defenders and imitators. But few such marriages, it is
true, are recorded in 1522, although Balthazar Sturmius, an Augustinian
monk of Saxony, committed the bolder indiscretion of marrying a widow
of Franconia. In that year, however, we find Franz von Sickingen,
knight-errant and condottiero, who was then a power in the state,
advocating the emancipation and marriage of the religious orders, in
a letter to his father-in-law, Diedrich von Henthschuchsheym. Still
more important was the movement inaugurated in Switzerland by Ulrich
Zwingli, who, with ten other monks of Nôtre-Dame-des-Hermites, on
the 2d of July, 1522, addressed to Hugo von Hohenlandemberg, Bishop
of Constance, a petition requesting the privilege of marriage. The
petitioners boldly argued the matter, citing the usual Scriptural
authorities, and adjured the bishop in the most pressing terms to
grant their request. They warned him that a refusal might entail
ruinous disorders on the whole sacerdotal body, and that, unless he
seized the opportunity to guide the movement, it might speedily assume
a most disastrous shape. They asserted, indeed, that not only in
Switzerland, but elsewhere, it was generally believed that a majority
of ecclesiastics had already chosen their future wives, and that a
return to the old order of things was beyond the power of man to
accomplish.[1061]
In this assertion, Zwingli and his companions followed perhaps rather
the dictates of their hopes than of their judgment, for the revolution
was by no means as universal or immediate as their threats or warnings
would indicate. Its progress, nevertheless, was rapid and decided.
Luther, whom we have seen, in the earlier part of 1522, still giving
but a qualified assent to the daring innovation of his followers, in
February, 1523, wrote to Spalatin in favor of a married pastor who was
seeking preferment at the hands of the Elector Frederic;[1062] and
in April, 1523, he himself officiated and preached a sermon in favor
of matrimony to a multitude of distinguished friends at the wedding
of Wenceslas Link, vicar of the Augustinian order, one of his oldest
and most valued supporters, who had stood unflinchingly by him when
arraigned by Cardinal Caietano before the Emperor Maximilian at the
Diet of Augsburg.[1063] Not less important was the countenance given to
the innovation, two days later, by the Elector Frederic, who consented
to act as sponsor at the baptism of the first-born of Franz Gunther,
pastor of Loch;[1064] the ceremony being performed by the honest
chronicler Spalatin himself.
It is curious to see in Spalatin’s diary how each successive marriage
is recorded as a matter of the utmost interest, the hopes of the
reformers being strengthened by every accession to the ranks of those
who dared to defy the rules which had been deemed irreversible for
centuries. Nor was it an act without danger, for no open rupture
had as yet taken place between the temporal power of any state and
the central authority at Rome. Even in Electoral Saxony, though
Duke Frederic, by a cautious course of passive resistance, afforded
protection to the heretics, yet he still considered himself a
Catholic, and the ritual of his chapel was unaltered. Elsewhere the
ecclesiastical power was bent on asserting its supremacy over the
licentious apostates who ventured to sully their vows and prostitute
the sacrament of marriage by their incestuous unions. The old charge
of promiscuous intercourse was resorted to in their case, as it has
been with almost every heresy in every age, for the purpose of exciting
popular odium,[1065] and wherever the discipline of the church could
be enforced, it was done unsparingly. The temper of these endeavors to
repress the movement is well illustrated by the regulations promulgated
under the authority of the Cardinal-legate Campeggi, when, in 1524, he
succeeded in uniting a number of reactionary princes at the Assembly of
Ratisbon. Deploring the sacrilege committed in the marriages of priests
and monks, which were becoming extremely common, he granted permission
to the secular powers to seize all such apostates and deliver them to
the ecclesiastical officials, significantly restraining them, however,
from inflicting torture. The officials were empowered to condemn the
offenders to perpetual imprisonment, or to hand them over to the
secular arm—a decent euphuism for a frightful death; and any negligence
on the part of the ordinaries exposed those officers to the pains and
penalties of heresy.[1066]
In spite of all this, however, the votaries of marriage had the
support and sympathy of the great body of the people. It shows how
widely diffused and strongly implanted was the conviction of the evils
of celibacy, when those who four centuries earlier had so cruelly
persecuted their pastors for not discarding their wives now urged them
to marriage, and were ready to protect them from the consequences of
the act. Thus, during the summer of 1524, Wolfgang Fabricius Capito,
provost of St. Thomas and priest of the church of St. Peter at
Strassburg, whom we have seen two years earlier prosecuting a married
priest, took to himself a wife, by the request of his parishioners,
and when the chapter of canons endeavored to interfere with him, the
threatening aspect of the populace warned them to desist. Nor was this
the only case, for Bishop William undertook to excommunicate all the
married priests of Strassburg, when the senate of the city resolutely
espoused their cause, and even the authority of the legate Campeggi
could not reconcile the quarrel.[1067]
Even higher protection was sometimes not wanting. When Adrian II., in
1522, reproached the Diet of Nürnberg with the inobservance of the
decree of Worms and the consequent growth of Lutheranism, and King
Ferdinand, in the name of the German states, replied that a council
for the reformation of the church was the only remedy, the question of
married priests arose for discussion. The German princes alleged that
they could find in the civil and municipal laws no provisions for the
punishment of such transgressions, and that the canons of discipline
could only be enforced by the ecclesiastical authorities themselves,
who ought not to be interfered with in the discharge of their duty by
the secular authorities.[1068] This was scant encouragement, but even
this was often denied in practice. When, in 1523, Conrad von Tungen,
Bishop of Wurzburg, threw into prison two of his canons, the doctors
John Apel and Frederic Fischer, for the crime of marrying nuns, the
Council of Regency at Nürnberg forced him to liberate them in a few
weeks.[1069] This latter fact is the more remarkable, since, but a
short time previous (March 6th, 1523), the Imperial Diet at Nürnberg,
under the auspices of the same Regency, had expressed its desire to
give every assistance to the ecclesiastical authority in enforcing the
canons. In a decree on the subject of the religious disturbances, it
adopted the canon law on celibacy as part of the civil law, pronouncing
sentence of imprisonment and confiscation on all members of the clergy
who should marry, and ordering the civil power in all cases to assist
the ecclesiastical in its efforts to punish offenders.[1070]
The emancipation of nuns excited considerable public interest, and in
many instances was effected by aid from without. A certain Leonhard
Kopp, who was a determined enemy of monachism, rendered himself
somewhat notorious by exploits of the kind. One of the earliest
instances was that by which, on Easter eve, 1523, at considerable risk,
he succeeded in carrying off from the convent of Nimptschen, in Misnia,
eight young virgins of noble birth, all of whom were subsequently
married, and one of whom was Catharine von Bora.[1071] The example was
contagious. Before the month was out six nuns, all of noble blood,
left the abbey of Sormitz, and soon after eight escaped from that of
Peutwitz, at Weissenfels.[1072] Monks enfranchised themselves with
still less trouble. At Nürnberg, in 1524, the Augustinians in a body
threw off their cowls and proclaimed themselves citizens.[1073]
Finally, Luther gave the last and most unquestionable proof of his
adhesion to the practice of sacerdotal marriage by espousing Catharine
von Bora, whom we have seen escaping, two years before, from the
convent of Nimptschen. Scandal, it would seem, had been busy with
the intimacy between the pious doctor and the fair renegade, who
had spent nearly the whole period of her liberty at Wittenberg, and
Luther, with the practical decision of character which distinguished
him, suddenly resolved to put the most effectual stop to rumors which
his enemies doubtless were delighted to circulate. On the evening of
June 13th, 1525, without consulting his friends, he invited to supper
Pomeranius, Lucas Cranach, and Apellus, and had the marriage ceremony
performed.[1074] It took his followers completely by surprise; many of
them disapproved of it, and Justus Jonas, in communicating the fact to
Spalatin, characterizes it as a startling event, and evidently feels
that his correspondent will require the most incontrovertible evidence
of the fact, when he declares that he himself had been present and
had seen the bridegroom in the marriage bed.[1075] If the portraits
after Lucas Cranach given in Mayer’s Dissertation on Catharine be
faithful likenesses, it was scarcely the beauty of his bride that led
Luther to take this step, for her features seem rather African than
European.[1076]