International Theological Library
A History of The Reformation
By
Thomas M. Lindsay, M.A., D.D.
Principal, The United Free Church College, Glasgow
In Two Volumes
Volume I
The Reformation in Germany From Its Beginning to the Religious Peace of
Augsburg
Edinburgh
T. & T. Clark
1906
CONTENTS
Series Advertisement.
Dedication.
Preface.
Book I. On The Eve Of The Reformation.
Chapter I. The Papacy.
§ 1. Claim to Universal Supremacy.
§ 2. The Temporal Supremacy.
§ 3. The Spiritual Supremacy.
Chapter II. The Political Situation.
§ 1. The small extent of Christendom.
§ 2. Consolidation.
§ 3. England.
§ 4. France.
§ 5. Spain.
§ 6. Germany and Italy.
§ 7. Italy.
§ 8. Germany.
Chapter III. The Renaissance.
§ 1. The Transition from the Mediæval to the Modern World.
§ 2. The Revival of Literature and Art.
§ 3. Its earlier relation to Christianity.
§ 4. The Brethren of the Common Lot.
§ 5. German Universities, Schools, and Scholarship.
§ 6. The earlier German Humanists.
§ 7. The Humanist Circles in the Cities.
§ 8. Humanism in the Universities.
§ 9. Reuchlin.
§ 10. The “Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum.”
§ 11. Ulrich von Hutten.
Chapter IV. Social Conditions.
§ 1. Towns and Trade.
§ 2. Geographical Discoveries and the beginning of a World Trade.
§ 3. Increase in Wealth and luxurious Living.
§ 4. The Condition of the Peasantry.
§ 5. Earlier Social Revolts.
§ 6. The religious Socialism of Hans Böhm.
§ 7. Bundschuh Revolts.
§ 8. The Causes of the continuous Revolts.
Chapter V. Family And Popular Religious Life in the Decades Before the
Reformation.
§ 1. Devotion of Germany to the Roman Church.
§ 2. Preaching.
§ 3. Church Festivals.
§ 4. The Family Religious Life.
§ 5. A superstitious Religion based on Fear.
§ 6. A non-Ecclesiastical Religion.
§ 7. The “Brethren.”
Chapter VI. Humanism And Reformation.
§ 1. Savonarola.
§ 2. John Colet.
§ 3. Erasmus.
Book II. The Reformation.
Chapter I. Luther to the Beginning of the Controversy About
Indulgences.
§ 1. Why Luther was successful as the Leader in a Reformation.
§ 2. Luther’s Youth and Education.
§ 3. Luther in the Erfurt Convent.
§ 4. Luther’s early Life in Wittenberg.
§ 5. Luther’s early Lectures in Theology.
§ 6. The Indulgence-seller.
Chapter II. From The Beginning of the Indulgence Controversy to the
Diet of Worms.
§ 1. The Theory and Practice of Indulgences in the Sixteenth
Century.
§ 2. Luther’s Theses.
§ 3. The Leipzig Disputation.
§ 4. The Three Treatises.
§ 5. The Papal Bull.
§ 6. Luther the Representative of Germany.
Chapter III. The Diet Of Worms.
§ 1. The Roman Nuncio Aleander.
§ 2. The Emperor Charles V.
§ 3. In the City of Worms.
§ 4. Luther in Worms.
§ 5. Luther’s first Appearance before the Diet of Worms.
§ 6. Luther’s Second Appearance before the Diet.
§ 7. The Conferences.
§ 8. The Ban.
§ 9. Popular Literature.
§ 10. The Spread of Luther’s Teaching.
§ 11. Andrew Bodenstein of Carlstadt.
§ 12. Luther back in Wittenberg.
Chapter IV. From The Diet of Worms to the Close Of the Peasants’ War.
§ 1. The continued spread of Lutheran Teaching.
§ 2. The beginnings of Division in Germany.
§ 3. The Peasants’ War.
§ 4. The Twelve Articles.
§ 5. The Suppression of the Revolt.
§ 6. Luther and the Peasants’ War.
§ 7. Germany divided into two separate Camps.
Chapter V. From The Diet Of Speyer, 1526, To The Religious Peace Of
Augsburg, 1555.
§ 1. The Diet of Speyer, 1526.
§ 2. The Protest.
§ 3. Luther and Zwingli.
§ 4. The Marburg Colloquy.
§ 5. The Emperor in Germany.
§ 6. The Diet of Augsburg 1530.
§ 7. The Augsburg Confession.
§ 8. The Reformation to be crushed.
§ 9. The Schmalkald League.
§ 10. The Bigamy of Philip of Hesse.
§ 11. Maurice of Saxony.
§ 12. Luther’s Death.
§ 13. The Religious War.
§ 14. The Augsburg Interim.
§ 15. Religious Peace of Augsburg.
Chapter VI. The Organisation Of Lutheran Churches.
Chapter VII. The Lutheran Reformation Outside Germany.
Chapter VIII. The Religious Principles Inspiring The Reformation.
§ 1. The Reformation did not take its rise from a Criticism of
Doctrines.
§ 2. The universal Priesthood of Believers.
§ 3. Justification by Faith.
§ 4. Holy Scripture.
§ 5. The Person of Christ.
§ 6. The Church.
Index.
Footnotes
[Cover Art]
[Transcriber’s Note: The cover image was produced by the submitter at
Distributed Proofreading, and is being placed into the public domain.]
SERIES ADVERTISEMENT.
_The International Theological Library._
UNDER THE EDITORSHIP OF
THE REV. CHARLES A. BRIGGS, D.D., D.LIT.,
_Professor of Theological Encyclopædia and Symbolics, Union Theological
Seminary, New York;_
AND
THE LATE REV. STEWART D. F. SALMOND, D.D.,
_Principal, and Professor of Systematic Theology and New Testament
Exegesis, United Free Church College, Aberdeen._
_This Library is designed to cover the whole field of Christian Theology.
Each volume is to be complete in itself, while, at the same time, it will
form part of a carefully planned whole. It is intended to form a Series of
Text-Books for Students of Theology. The Authors will be scholars of
recognised reputation in the several branches of study assigned to them.
They will be associated with each other and with the Editors in the effort
to provide a series of volumes which may adequately represent the present
condition of investigation._
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
THIRTEEN VOLUMES OF THE SERIES ARE NOW READY, VIZ.:—
An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament. By S. R. DRIVER,
D.D., D.Litt., Regius Professor of Hebrew, and Canon of Christ Church,
Oxford. _Seventh Edition._ 12s.
Christian Ethics. By NEWMAN SMYTH, D.D., Pastor of the First
Congregational Church, New Haven, Conn. _Third Edition._ 10s. 6d.
Apologetics. By the late A. B. BRUCE, D.D., Professor of New Testament
Exegesis, Free Church College, Glasgow. _Third Edition._ 10s. 6d.
History of Christian Doctrine. By G. P. FISHER, D.D., LL.D., Professor of
Ecclesiastical History, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. _Second
Edition._ 12s.
A History of Christianity In the Apostolic Age. By ARTHUR CUSHMAN
MCGIFFERT, Ph.D., D.D., Professor of Church History, Union Theological
Seminary, New York. 12s.
Christian Institutions. By A. V. G. ALLEN, D.D., Professor of
Ecclesiastical History, Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, Mass.
12s.
The Christian Pastor. By WASHINGTON GLADDEN, D.D., LL.D., Pastor of
Congregational Church, Columbus, Ohio. 10s. 6d.
The Theology of the New Testament. By GEORGE B. STEVENS, D.D., LL.D.,
Professor of Systematic Theology in Yale University, U.S.A. 12s.
The Ancient Catholic Church. By ROBERT RAINY, D.D., Principal of The New
College, Edinburgh. 12s.
Old Testament History. By H.P. SMITH, D.D., Professor of Biblical History,
Amherst College, U.S.A. 12s.
The Theology of the Old Testament. By the late A.B. DAVIDSON, D.D., LL.D.
Edited by the late Principal SALMOND, D.D. 12s.
Doctrine of Salvation. By GEORGE B. STEVENS, D.D., LL.D., Professor of
Systematic Theology, Yale University. 12s.
The Reformation. (Vol. I.—In Germany.) By T. M. LINDSAY, D.D., Principal
of the United Free Church College, Glasgow. 10s. 6d.
VOLUMES IN PREPARATION:—
The Reformation. (Vol. II.—In Lands beyond Germany.) By T.M. LINDSAY,
D.D., Principal of the United Free Church College, Glasgow.
The Literature of the New Testament. By JAMES MOFFATT, D.D., United Free
Church, Dundonald, Scotland.
Contemporary History of the Old Testament. By FRANCIS BROWN, D.D., D.Lit.,
Professor of Hebrew and Cognate Languages, Union Theological Seminary, New
York.
The Early Latin Church. By CHARLES BIGG, D.D., Regius Professor of Church
History, and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford.
Canon and Text of the New Testament. By CASPAR RENÉ GREGORY, D.D., LL.D.,
Professor in the University of Leipzig.
Contemporary History of the New Testament. By FRANK C. PORTER, Ph.D., Yale
University, New Haven, Conn.
Philosophy of Religion. By ROBERT FLINT, D.D., LL.D., Emeritus Professor
of Divinity, University of Edinburgh.
Later Latin Church. By E. W. WATSON, M.A., Professor of Church History,
King’s College, London.
The Christian Preacher. By W. T. DAVISON, D.D., Tutor in Systematic
Theology, Richmond College, Surrey.
The Greek and Oriental Churches. By W. F. ADENEY, D.D., Principal of
Lancashire College, Manchester.
Biblical Archæology. By G. BUCHANAN GRAY, D.D., Professor of Hebrew,
Mansfield College, Oxford.
The History of Religions. By GEORGE F. MOORE, D.D., LL.D., Professor in
Harvard University.
Doctrine of God. By WILLIAM N. CLARKE, D.D. Professor of Systematic
Theology, Hamilton Theological Seminary, N.Y.
Doctrine of Christ. By H.R. MACKINTOSH, Ph.D., Professor of Systematic
Theology, The New College, Edinburgh.
Doctrine of Man. By WILLIAM P. PATERSON, D.D., Professor of Divinity,
University of Edinburgh.
Canon and Text of the Old Testament. By F.C. BURKITT, M.A., University
Lecturer on Palāography, Trinity College, Cambridge.
The Life of Christ. By WILLIAM SANDAY, D.D., LL.D., Lady Margaret
Professor of Divinity, and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford.
Christian Symbolics. By C. A. BRIGGS, D.D., D.Lit., Professor of
Theological Encyclopedia and Symbolics, Union Theological Seminary, New
York.
Rabbinical Literature. By S. SCHECHTER, M.A., President of the Jewish
Theological Seminary, N.Y.
DEDICATION.
TO
THE REV. GEORGE CLARK HUTTON, D.D.
PREFACE.
This History of the Reformation has been written with the intention of
describing a great religious movement amid its social environment. The
times were heroic, and produced great men, with striking individualities
not easily weighed in modern balances. The age is sufficiently remote to
compel us to remember that while the morality of one century can be judged
by another, the men who belong to it must be judged by the standard of
their contemporaries, and not altogether by ours. The religious revival
was set in a framework of political, intellectual, and economic changes,
and cannot be disentangled from its surroundings without danger of
mutilation. All these things add to the difficulty of description.
My excuse, if excuse be needed, for venturing on the task is that the
period is one to which I have devoted special attention for many years,
and that I have read and re-read most of the original contemporary sources
of information. While full use has been made of the labours of
predecessors in the same field, no chapter in the volume, save that on the
political condition of Europe, has been written without constant reference
to contemporary evidence.
A History of the Reformation, it appears to me, must describe five
distinct but related things—the social and religious conditions of the age
out of which the great movement came; the Lutheran Reformation down to
1555, when it received legal recognition; the Reformation in countries
beyond Germany which did not submit to the guidance of Luther; the issue
of certain portions of the religious life of the Middle Ages in
Anabaptism, Socinianism, and Anti-Trinitarianism; and, finally, the
Counter-Reformation.
The second follows the first in natural succession; but the third was
almost contemporary with the second. If the Reformation won its way to
legal recognition earlier in Germany than in any other land, its
beginnings in France, England, and perhaps the Netherlands, had appeared
before Luther had published his _Theses_. I have not found it possible to
describe all the five in chronological order.
This volume describes the eve of the Reformation and the movement itself
under the guidance of Luther. In a second volume I hope to deal with the
Reformation beyond Germany, with Anabaptism, Socinianism, and kindred
matters which had their roots far back in the Middle Ages, and with the
Counter-Reformation.
The first part of this volume deals with the intellectual, social, and
religious life of the age which gave birth to the Reformation. The
intellectual life of the times has been frequently described, and its
economic conditions are beginning to attract attention. But few have cared
to investigate popular and family religious life in the decades before the
great revival. Yet for the history of the Reformation movement nothing can
be more important. When it is studied, it can be seen that the evangelical
revival was not a unique phenomenon, entirely unconnected with the
immediate past. There was a continuity in the religious life of the
period. The same hymns were sung in public and in private after the
Reformation which had been in use before Luther raised the standard of
revolt. Many of the prayers in the Reformation liturgies came from the
service-books of the mediæval Church. Much of the family instruction in
religious matters received by the Reformers when they were children was in
turn taught by them to the succeeding generation. The great Reformation
had its roots in the simple evangelical piety which had never entirely
disappeared in the mediæval Church. Luther’s teaching was recognised by
thousands to be no startling novelty, but something which they had always
at heart believed, though they might not have been able to formulate it.
It is true that Luther and his fellow-Reformers taught their generation
that Our Lord, Jesus Christ, filled the whole sphere of God, and that
other mediators and intercessors were superfluous, and that they also
delivered it from the fear of a priestly caste; but men did not receive
that teaching as entirely new; they rather accepted it as something they
had always felt, though they had not been able to give their feelings due
and complete expression. It is true that this simple piety had been set in
a framework of superstition, and that the Church had been generally looked
upon as an institution within which priests exercised a secret science of
redemption through their power over the sacraments; but the old
evangelical piety existed, and its traces can be found when sought for.
A portion of the chapter which describes the family and popular religious
life immediately preceding the Reformation has already appeared in the
_London Quarterly Review_ for October 1903.
In describing the beginnings of the Lutheran Reformation, I have had to go
over the same ground covered by my chapter on “Luther” contributed to the
second volume of the _Cambridge Modern History_, and have found it
impossible not to repeat myself. This is specially the case with the
account given of the theory and practice of Indulgences. It ought to be
said, however, that in view of certain strictures on the earlier work by
Roman Catholic reviewers, I have gone over again the statements made about
Indulgences by the great mediæval theologians of the thirteenth and
fifteenth centuries, and have not been able to change the opinions
previously expressed.
My thanks are due to my colleague, Dr. Denney, and to another friend for
the care they have taken in revising the proof-sheets, and for many
valuable suggestions which have been given effect to.
Thomas M. Lindsay.
_March, 1906._
BOOK I. ON THE EVE OF THE REFORMATION.
Chapter I. The Papacy.(1)
§ 1. Claim to Universal Supremacy.
The long struggle between the Mediæval Church and the Mediæval Empire,
between the priest and the warrior,(2) ended, in the earlier half of the
thirteenth century, in the overthrow of the Hohenstaufens, and left the
Papacy sole inheritor of the claim of ancient Rome to be sovereign of the
civilised world.
_Roma caput mundi regit orbis frena rotundi._
Strong and masterful Popes had for centuries insisted on exercising powers
which, they asserted, belonged to them as the successors of St. Peter and
the representatives of Christ upon earth. Ecclesiastical jurists had
translated their assertions into legal language, and had expressed them in
principles borrowed from the old imperial law. Precedents, needed by the
legal mind to unite the past with the present, had been found in a series
of imaginary papal judgments extending over past centuries. The forged
decretals of the pseudo-Isidor (used by Pope Nicholas I. in his letter of
866 A.D. to the bishops of Gaul), of the group of canonists who supported
the pretensions of Pope Gregory VII. (1073-1085),—Anselm of Lucca,
Deusdedit, Cardinal Bonzio, and Gregory of Pavia,—gave to the papal claims
the semblance of the sanction of antiquity. The Decretum of Gratian,
issued in 1150 from Bologna, then the most famous Law School in Europe,
incorporated all these earlier forgeries and added new ones. It displaced
the older collections of Canon Law and became the starting-point for
succeeding canonists. Its mosaic of facts and falsehoods formed the basis
for the theories of the imperial powers and of the universal jurisdiction
of the Bishops of Rome.(3)
The picturesque religious background of this conception of the Church of
Christ as a great temporal empire had been furnished by St. Augustine,
although probably he would have been the first to protest against the use
made of his vision of the City of God. His unfinished masterpiece, _De
Civitate Dei_, in which with a devout and glowing imagination he had
contrasted the _Civitas Terrena_, or the secular State founded on conquest
and maintained by fraud and violence, with the Kingdom of God, which he
identified with the visible ecclesiastical society, had filled the
imagination of all Christians in the days immediately preceding the
dissolution of the Roman Empire of the West, and had contributed in a
remarkable degree to the final overthrow of the last remains of a cultured
paganism. It became the sketch outline which the jurists of the Roman
Curia gradually filled in with details by their strictly defined and
legally expressed claim of the Roman Pontiff to a universal jurisdiction.
Its living but poetically indefinite ideas were transformed into clearly
defined legal principles found ready-made in the all-embracing
jurisprudence of the ancient empire, and were analysed and exhibited in
definite claims to rule and to judge in every department of human
activity. When poetic thoughts, which from their very nature stretch
forward towards and melt in the infinite, are imprisoned within legal
formulas and are changed into principles of practical jurisprudence, they
lose all their distinctive character, and the creation which embodies them
becomes very different from what it was meant to be. The mischievous
activity of the Roman canonists actually transformed the _Civitas Dei_ of
the glorious vision of St. Augustine into that _Civitas Terrena_ which he
reprobated, and the ideal Kingdom of God became a vulgar earthly monarchy,
with all the accompaniments of conquest, fraud, and violence which,
according to the great theologian of the West, naturally belonged to such
a society. But the glamour of the City of God long remained to dazzle the
eyes of gifted and pious men during the earlier Middle Ages, when they
contemplated the visible ecclesiastical empire ruled by the Bishop of
Rome.
The requirements of the practical religion of everyday life were also
believed to be in the possession of this ecclesiastical monarchy to give
and to withhold. For it was the almost universal belief of mediæval piety
that the mediation of a priest was essential to salvation; and the
priesthood was an integral part of this monarchy, and did not exist
outside its boundaries. “No good Catholic Christian doubted that in
spiritual things the clergy were the divinely appointed superiors of the
laity, that this power proceeded from the right of the priests to
celebrate the sacraments, that the Pope was the real possessor of this
power, and was far superior to all secular authority.”(4) In the decades
immediately preceding the Reformation, many an educated man might have
doubts about this power of the clergy over the spiritual and eternal
welfare of men and women; but when it came to the point, almost no one
could venture to say that there was nothing in it. And so long as the
feeling remained that there might be something in it, the anxieties, to
say the least, which Christian men and women could not help having when
they looked forward to an unknown future, made kings and peoples hesitate
before they offered defiance to the Pope and the clergy. The spiritual
powers which were believed to come from the exclusive possession of
priesthood and sacraments went for much in increasing the authority of the
papal empire and in binding it together in one compact whole.
In the earlier Middle Ages the claims of the Papacy to universal supremacy
had been urged and defended by ecclesiastical jurists alone; but in the
thirteenth century theology also began to state them from its own point of
view. Thomas Aquinas set himself to prove that submission to the Roman
Pontiff was necessary for every human being. He declared that, under the
law of the New Testament, the king must be subject to the priest to the
extent that, if kings proved to be heretics or schismatics, the Bishop of
Rome was entitled to deprive them of all kingly authority by releasing
subjects from their ordinary obedience.(5)
The fullest expression of this temporal and spiritual supremacy claimed by
the Bishops of Rome is to be found in Pope Innocent IV.’s _Commentary on
the Decretals_(6) (1243-1254), and in the Bull, _Unam Sanctam_, published
by Pope Boniface VIII. in 1302. But succeeding Bishops of Rome in no way
abated their pretensions to universal sovereignty. The same claims were
made during the Exile at Avignon and in the days of the Great Schism. They
were asserted by Pope Pius II. in his Bull, _Execrabilis et pristinis_
(1459), and by Pope Leo X. on the very eve of the Reformation, in his
Bull, _Pastor Æternus_ (1516); while Pope Alexander VI. (Rodrigo Borgia),
acting as the lord of the universe, made over the New World to Isabella of
Castile and to Ferdinand of Aragon by legal deed of gift in his Bull,
_Inter cætera divinæ_ (May 4th, 1493).(7)
The power claimed in these documents was a twofold supremacy, temporal and
spiritual.
§ 2. The Temporal Supremacy.
The former, stated in its widest extent, was the right to depose kings,
free their subjects from their allegiance, and bestow their territories on
another. It could only be enforced when the Pope found a stronger
potentate willing to carry out his orders, and was naturally but rarely
exercised. Two instances, however, occurred not long before the
Reformation. George Podiebrod, the King of Bohemia, offended the Bishop of
Rome by insisting that the Roman See should keep the bargain made with his
Hussite subjects at the Council of Basel. He was summoned to Rome to be
tried as a heretic by Pope Pius II. in 1464, and by Pope Paul II. in 1465,
and was declared by the latter to be deposed; his subjects were released
from their allegiance, and his kingdom was offered to Matthias Corvinus,
the King of Hungary, who gladly accepted the offer, and a protracted and
bloody war was the consequence. Later still, in 1511, Pope Julius II.
excommunicated the King of Navarre, and empowered any neighbouring king to
seize his dominions—an offer readily accepted by Ferdinand of Aragon.(8)
It was generally, however, in more indirect ways that this claim to
temporal supremacy, _i.e._ to direct the policy, and to be the final
arbiter in the actions of temporal sovereigns, made itself felt. A great
potentate, placed over the loosely formed kingdoms of the Middle Ages,
hesitated to provoke a contest with an authority which was able to give
religious sanction to the rebellion of powerful feudal nobles seeking a
legitimate pretext for defying him, or which could deprive his subjects of
the external consolations of religion by laying the whole or part of his
dominions under an interdict. We are not to suppose that the exercise of
this claim of temporal supremacy was always an evil thing. Time after time
the actions and interference of right-minded Popes proved that the
temporal supremacy of the Bishop of Rome meant that moral considerations
must have due weight attached to them in the international affairs of
Europe; and this fact, recognised and felt, accounted largely for much of
the practical acquiescence in the papal claims. But from the time when the
Papacy became, on its temporal side, an Italian power, and when its
international policy had for its chief motive to increase the political
prestige of the Bishop of Rome within the Italian peninsula, the moral
standard of the papal court was hopelessly lowered, and it no longer had
even the semblance of representing morality in the international affairs
of Europe. The change may be roughly dated from the pontificate of Pope
Sixtus IV. (1471-1484), or from the birth of Luther (November 10th, 1483).
The possession of the Papacy gave this advantage to Sixtus over his
contemporaries in Italy, that he “was relieved of all ordinary
considerations of decency, consistency, or prudence, because his position
as Pope saved him from serious disaster.” The divine authority, assumed by
the Popes as the representatives of Christ upon earth, meant for Sixtus
and his immediate successors that they were above the requirements of
common morality, and had the right for themselves or for their allies to
break the most solemn treaties when it suited their shifting policy.
§ 3. The Spiritual Supremacy.
The ecclesiastical supremacy was gradually interpreted to mean that the
Bishop of Rome was the _one_ or universal bishop in whom all spiritual and
ecclesiastical powers were summed up, and that all other members of the
hierarchy were simply delegates selected by him for the purposes of
administration. On this interpretation, the Bishop of Rome was the
absolute monarch over a kingdom which was called spiritual, but which was
as thoroughly material as were those of France, Spain, or England. For,
according to mediæval ideas, men were spiritual if they had taken orders,
or were under monastic vows; fields, drains, and fences were spiritual
things if they were Church property; a house, a barn, or a byre was a
spiritual thing, if it stood on land belonging to the Church. This papal
kingdom, miscalled spiritual, lay scattered over Europe in diocesan lands,
convent estates, and parish glebes—interwoven in the web of the ordinary
kingdoms and principalities of Europe. It was part of the Pope’s claim to
_spiritual_ supremacy that his subjects (the clergy) owed no allegiance to
the monarch within whose territories they resided; that they lived outside
the sphere of civil legislation and taxation; and that they were under
special laws imposed on them by their supreme spiritual ruler, and paid
taxes to him and to him alone. The claim to spiritual supremacy therefore
involved endless interference with the rights of temporal sovereignty in
every country in Europe, and things civil and things sacred were so
inextricably mixed that it is quite impossible to speak of the Reformation
as a purely religious movement. It was also an endeavour to put an end to
the exemption of the Church and its possessions from all secular control,
and to her constant encroachment on secular territory.
To show how this claim for spiritual supremacy trespassed continually on
the domain of secular authority and created a spirit of unrest all over
Europe, we have only to look at its exercise in the matter of patronage to
benefices, to the way in which the common law of the Church interfered
with the special civil laws of European States, and to the increasing
burden of papal requisitions of money.
In the case of bishops, the theory was that the dean and chapter elected,
and that the bishop-elect had to be confirmed by the Pope. This procedure
provided for the selection locally of a suitable spiritual ruler, and also
for the supremacy of the head of the Church. The mediæval bishops,
however, were temporal lords of great influence in the civil affairs of
the kingdom or principality within which their dioceses were placed, and
it was naturally an object of interest to kings and princes to secure men
who would be faithful to themselves. Hence the tendency was for the civil
authorities to interfere more or less in episcopal appointments. This
frequently resulted in making these elections a matter of conflict between
the head of the Church in Rome and the head of the State in France,
England, or Germany; in which case the rights of the dean and chapter were
commonly of small account. The contest was in the nature of things almost
inevitable even when the civil and the ecclesiastical powers were actuated
by the best motives, and when both sought to appoint men competent to
discharge the duties of the position with ability. But the best motives
were not always active. Diocesan rents were large, and the incomes of
bishops made excellent provision for the favourite followers of kings and
of Popes, and if the revenues of one see failed to express royal or papal
favour adequately, the favourite could be appointed to several sees at
once. Papal nepotism became a byword; but it ought to be remembered that
kingly nepotism also existed. Pope Sixtus V. insisted on appointing a
retainer of his nephew, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, to the see of
Modrus in Hungary, and after a contest of three years carried his point in
1483; and Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, gave the archbishopric of
Gran to Ippolito d’Este, a youth under age, and after a two years’
struggle compelled the Pope to confirm the appointment in 1487.
During the fourteenth century the Papacy endeavoured to obtain a more
complete control over ecclesiastical appointments by means of the system
of _Reservations_ which figures so largely in local ecclesiastical affairs
to the discredit of the Papacy during the years before the Reformation.
For at least a century earlier, Popes had been accustomed to declare on
various pretexts that certain benefices were _vacantes apud Sedem
Apostolicam_, which meant that the Bishop of Rome reserved the appointment
for himself. Pope John XXII. (1316-1334), founding on such previous
practice, laid down a series of rules stating what benefices were to be
reserved for the papal patronage. The ostensible reason for this
legislation was to prevent the growing evil of pluralities; but, as in all
cases of papal lawmaking, these _Constitutiones Johanninæ_ had the effect
of binding ecclesiastically all patrons but the Popes themselves. For the
Popes always maintained that they alone were superior to the laws which
they made. They were _supra legem_ or _legibus absoluti_, and their
dispensations could always set aside their legislation when it suited
their purpose. Under these constitutions of Pope John XXII., when sees
were vacant owing to the invalidation of an election they were _reserved_
to the Pope. Thus we find that there was a disputed election to the see of
Dunkeld in 1337, and after some years’ litigation at Rome the election was
quashed, and Richard de Pilmor was appointed bishop _auctoritate
apostolica_. The see of Dunkeld was declared to be reserved to the Pope
for the appointment of the two succeeding bishops at least.(9) This system
of _Reservations_ was gradually extended under the successors of Pope John
XXII., and was applied to benefices of every kind all over Europe, until
it would be difficult to say what piece of ecclesiastical preferment
escaped the papal net. There exists in the town library in Trier a MS. of
the _Rules of the Roman Chancery_ on which someone has sketched the head
of a Pope, with the legend issuing from the mouth, _Reservamus omnia_,
which somewhat roughly represents the contents of the book. In the end,
the assertion was made that the Holy See owned all benefices, and, in the
universal secularisation of the Church which the half century before the
Reformation witnessed, the very Rules of the Roman Chancery contained the
lists of prices to be charged for various benefices, whether with or
without cure of souls; and in completing the bargain the purchaser could
always procure a clause setting aside the civil rights of patrons.
On the other hand, ecclesiastical preferments always implied the holders
being liferented in lands and in monies, and the right to bestow these
temporalities was protected by the laws of most European countries. Thus
the ever-extending papal _reservations_ of benefices led to continual
conflicts between the laws of the Church—in this case latterly the Rules
of the Roman Chancery—and the laws of the European States. Temporal rulers
sought to protect themselves and their subjects by statutes of _Præmunire_
and others of a like kind,(10) or else made bargains with the Popes, which
took the form of _Concordats_, like that of Bourges (1438) and that of
Vienna (1448). Neither statutes nor bargains were of much avail against
the superior diplomacy of the Papacy, and the dread which its supposed
possession of spiritual powers inspired in all classes of people. A
Concordat was always represented by papal lawyers to be binding only so
long as the goodwill of the Pope maintained it; and there was a
deep-seated feeling throughout the peoples of Europe that the Church was,
to use the language of the peasants of Germany, “the Pope’s House,” and
that he had a right to deal freely with its property. Pious and patriotic
men, like Gascoigne in England, deplored the evil effects of the papal
_reservations_; but they saw no remedy unless the Almighty changed the
heart of the Holy Father; and, after the failures of the Conciliar
attempts at reform, a sullen hopelessness seemed to have taken possession
of the minds of men, until Luther taught them that there was nothing in
the indefinable power that the Pope and the clergy claimed to possess over
the spiritual and eternal welfare of men and women.
To Pope John XXII. (1316-1334) belongs the credit or discredit of creating
for the Papacy a machinery for gathering in money for its support. His
situation rendered this almost inevitable. On his accession he found
himself with an empty treasury; he had to incur debts in order to live; he
had to provide for a costly war with the Visconti; and he had to leave
money to enable his successors to carry out his temporal policy. Few Popes
lived so plainly; his money-getting was not for personal luxury, but for
the supposed requirements of the papal policy. He was the first Pope who
systematically made the dispensation of grace, temporal and eternal, a
source of revenue. Hitherto the charges made by the papal Chancery had
been, ostensibly at least, for actual work done—fees for clerking and
registration, and so on. John made the fees proportionate to the grace
dispensed, or to the power of the recipient to pay. He and his successors
made the _Tithes_, the _Annates_, _Procurations_, Fees for the bestowment
of the _Pallium_, the _Medii Fructus_, _Subsidies_, and _Dispensations_,
regular sources of revenue.
The _Tithe_—a tenth of all ecclesiastical incomes for the service of the
Papacy—had been levied occasionally for extraordinary purposes, such as
crusades. It was still supposed to be levied for special purposes only,
but necessary occasions became almost continuous, and the exactions were
fiercely resented. When Alexander VI. levied the _Tithe_ in 1500, he was
allowed to do so in England. The French clergy, however, refused to pay;
they were excommunicated; the University of Paris declared the
excommunication unlawful, and the Pope had to withdraw.
The _Annates_ were an ancient charge. From the beginning of the twelfth
century the incoming incumbent of a benefice had to pay over his first
year’s income for local uses, such as the repairs on ecclesiastical
buildings, or as a solatium to the heirs of the deceased incumbent. From
the beginning of the thirteenth century prelates and princes were
sometimes permitted by the Popes to exact it of entrants into benefices.
One of the earliest recorded instances was when the Archbishop of
Canterbury was allowed to use the _Annates_ of his province for a period
of seven years from 1245, for the purpose of liquidating the debts on his
cathedral church. Pope John XXII. began to appropriate them for the
purposes of the Papacy. His predecessor Clement V. (1305-1314) had
demanded all the _Annates_ of England and Scotland for a period of three
years from 1316. In 1316 John made a much wider demand, and in terms which
showed that he was prepared to regard the _Annates_ as a permanent tax for
the general purposes of the Papacy. It is difficult to trace the stages of
the gradual universal enforcement of this tax; but in the decades before
the Reformation it was commonly imposed, and averages had been struck as
to its amount.(11) “They consisted of a portion, usually computed at
one-half, of the estimated revenue of all benefices worth more than 25
florins. Thus the archbishopric of Rouen was taxed at 12,000 florins, and
the little see of Grenoble at 300; the great abbacy of St. Denis at 6000,
and the little St. Ciprian Poictiers at 33; while all the parish cures in
France were uniformly rated at 24 ducats, equivalent to about 30 florins.”
Archbishoprics were subject to a special tax as the price of the
_Pallium_, and this was often very large.
The _Procurationes_ were the charges, commuted to money payments, which
bishops and archdeacons were authorised to make for their personal
expenses while on their tours of visitation throughout their dioceses. The
Popes began by demanding a share, and ended by often claiming the whole of
these sums.
Pope John XXII. was the first to require that the incomes of vacant
benefices (_medii fructus_) should be paid over to the papal treasury
during the vacancies. The earliest instance dates from 1331, when a demand
was made for the income of the vacant archbishopric of Gran in Hungary;
and it soon became the custom to insist that the stipends of all vacant
benefices should be paid into the papal treasury.
Finally, the Popes declared it to be their right to require special
_subsidies_ from ecclesiastical provinces, and great pressure was put on
the people to pay these so-called free-will offerings.
Besides the sums which poured into the papal treasury from these regular
sources of income, irregular sources afforded still larger amounts of
money. Countless dispensations were issued on payment of fees for all
manner of breaches of canonical and moral law—dispensations for marriages
within the prohibited degrees, for holding pluralities, for acquiring
unjust gains in trade or otherwise. This demoralising traffic made the
Roman treasury the partner in all kinds of iniquitous actions, and Luther,
in his address _To the Nobility of the German Nation respecting the
Reformation of the Christian Estate_, could fitly describe the Court of
the Roman Curia as a place “where vows were annulled, where the monk gets
leave to quit his Order, where priests can enter the married life for
money, where bastards can become legitimate, and dishonour and shame may
arrive at high honours; all evil repute and disgrace is knighted and
ennobled.” “There is,” he adds, “a buying and a selling, a changing,
blustering and bargaining, cheating and lying, robbing and stealing,
debauchery and villainy, and all kinds of contempt of God that Antichrist
could not reign worse.”
The vast sums of money obtained in these ways do not represent the whole
of the funds which flowed from all parts of Europe into the papal
treasury. The Roman Curia was the highest court of appeal for the whole
Church of the West. In any case this involved a large amount of law
business, with the inevitable legal expenses; but the Curia managed to
attract to itself a large amount of business which might have been easily
settled in the episcopal or metropolitan courts. This was done in
pursuance of a double policy—an ecclesiastical and a financial one. The
half century before the Reformation saw the overthrow of feudalism and the
consolidation of kingly absolutism, and something similar was to be seen
in the Papacy as well as among the principalities of Europe. Just as the
kingly absolutism triumphed when the hereditary feudal magnates lost their
power, so papal absolutism could only become an accomplished fact when it
could trample upon an episcopate deprived of its ecclesiastical
independence and inherent powers of ruling and judging. The Episcopate was
weakened in many ways,—by exempting abbacies from episcopal control, by
encouraging the mendicant monks to become the rivals of the parish clergy,
and so on,—but the most potent method of degrading it was by encouraging
people with ecclesiastical complaints to pass by the episcopal courts and
to carry their cases directly to the Pope. Nationalities, men were told,
had no place within the Catholic Church. Rome was the common fatherland,
and the Pope the universal bishop and judge ordinary. His judgment, which
was always final, could be had directly. In this way men were enticed to
take their pleas straight to the Pope. No doubt this involved sending a
messenger to Italy with a statement of the plea and a request for a
hearing; but it did not necessarily involve that the trial should take
place at Rome. The central power could delegate its authority, and the
trial could take place wherever the Pope might appoint. But the conception
undoubtedly did increase largely the business of the courts actually held
in Rome, and caused a flow of money to the imperial city. The Popes were
also ready to lend monies to impoverished litigants, for which, of course,
heavy interest was charged.
The immense amount of business which was thus directed into the papal
chancery from all parts of Europe required a horde of officials, whose
salaries were provided partly from the incomes of _reserved_ benefices all
over Europe, and partly from the fees and bribes of the litigants. The
papal law-courts were notoriously dilatory, rapacious, and venal. Every
document had to pass through an incredible number of hands, and pay a
corresponding number of fees; and the costs of suits, heavy enough
according to the prescribed rule of the chancery, were increased immensely
beyond the regular charges by others which did not appear on the official
tables. Cases are on record where the _briefs_ obtained cost from
twenty-four to forty-one times the amount of the legitimate official
charges. The Roman Church had become a law-court, not of the most
reputable kind,—an arena of rival litigants, a chancery of writers,
notaries, and tax-gatherers,—where transactions about privileges,
dispensations, buying of benefices, etc., were carried on, and where
suitors went wandering with their petitions from the door of one office to
another.
During the half century which preceded the Reformation, things went from
bad to worse. The fears aroused by the attempts at a reform through
General Councils had died down, and the Curia had no desire to reform
itself. The venality and rapacity increased when Popes began to sell
offices in the papal court. Boniface IX. (1389-1404) was the first to
raise money by selling these official posts to the highest bidders. “In
1483, when Sixtus IV. (1471-1484) desired to redeem his tiara and jewels,
pledged for a loan of 100,000 ducats, he increased his secretaries from
six to twenty-four, and required each to pay 2600 florins for the office.
In 1503, to raise funds for Cæsar Borgia, Alexander VI. (1492-1503)
created eighty new offices, and sold them for 760 ducats apiece. Julius
II. formed a ‘college’ of one hundred and one scriveners of papal briefs,
in return for which they paid him 74,000 ducats. Leo X. (1513-1521)
appointed sixty chamberlains and a hundred and forty squires, with certain
perquisites, for which the former paid him 90,000 ducats and the latter
112,000. Places thus paid for were personal property, transferable on
sale. Burchard tells us that in 1483 he bought the mastership of
ceremonies from his predecessor Patrizzi for 450 ducats, which covered all
expenses; that in 1505 he vainly offered Julius II. (1503-1513) 2000
ducats for a vacant scrivenership, and that soon after he bought the
succession to an abbreviatorship for 2040.”(12) When Adrian VI.
(1522-1523) honestly tried to cleanse this Augean stable, he found himself
confronted with the fact that he would have to turn men adrift who had
spent their capital in buying the places which any reform must suppress.
The papal exactions needed to support this luxurious Roman Court,
especially those taken from the clergy of Europe, were so obnoxious that
it was often hard to collect them, and devices were used which in the end
increased the burdens of those who were required to provide the money. The
papal court made bargains with the temporal rulers to share the spoils if
they permitted the collection.(13) The Popes agreed that the kings or
princes could seize the _Tithes_ or _Annates_ for a prescribed time
provided the papal officials had their authority to collect them, as a
rule, for Roman use. In the decades before the Reformation it was the
common practice to collect these dues by means of agents, often bankers,
whose charges were enormous, amounting sometimes to fifty per cent. The
collection of such extraordinary sources of revenue as the Indulgences was
marked by even worse abuses, such as the employment of pardon-sellers, who
overran Europe, and whose lies and extortions were the common theme of the
denunciations of the greatest preachers and patriots of the times.
The unreformed Papacy of the closing decades of the fifteenth and of the
first quarter of the sixteenth century was the open sore of Europe, and
the object of execrations by almost all contemporary writers. Its abuses
found no defenders, and its partisans in attacking assailants contented
themselves with insisting upon the necessity for the spiritual supremacy
of the Bishops of Rome.
“Sant Peters schifflin ist im schwangk
Ich sorge fast den untergangk,
Die wallen schlagen allsit dran,
Es würt vil sturm und plagen han.”(14)
Chapter II. The Political Situation.(15)
§ 1. The small extent of Christendom.
During the period of the Reformation a small portion of the world belonged
to Christendom, and of that only a part was affected, either really or
nominally, by the movement. The Christians belonging to the Greek Church
were entirely outside its influence.
Christendom had shrunk greatly since the seventh century. The Saracens and
their successors in Moslem sovereignty had overrun and conquered many
lands which had formerly been inhabited by a Christian population and
governed by Christian rulers. Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, Egypt, and
North Africa westwards to the Straits of Gibraltar, had once been
Christian, and had been lost to Christendom during the seventh and eighth
centuries. The Moslems had invaded Europe in the West, had conquered the
Spanish Peninsula, had passed the Pyrenees, and had invaded France. They
were met and defeated in a three days’ battle at Tours (732) by the Franks
under Charles the Hammer, the grandfather of Charles the Great. After they
had been thrust back beyond the Pyrenees, the Spanish Peninsula was the
scene of a struggle between Moslem and Christian which lasted for more
than seven hundred years, and Spain did not become wholly Christian until
the last decade of the fifteenth century.
If the tide of Moslem conquest had been early checked in the West, in the
East it had flowed steadily if slowly. In 1338, Orchan, Sultan of the
Ottoman Turks, seized on Gallipoli, the fortified town which guarded the
eastern entrance to the Dardanelles, and the Moslems won a footing on
European soil. A few years later the troops of his son Murad I. had seized
a portion of the Balkan peninsula, and had cut off Constantinople from the
rest of Christendom. A hundred years after, Constantinople (1453) had
fallen, the Christian population had been slain or enslaved, the great
church of the _Holy Wisdom_ (St. Sophia) had been made a Mohammedan
mosque, and the city had become the metropolis of the wide-spreading
empire of the Ottoman Turks. Servia, Bosnia, Herzogovina (the Duchy, from
_Herzog_, a Duke), Greece, the Peloponnesus, Roumania, Wallachia, and
Moldavia were incorporated in the Moslem Empire. Belgrade and the island
of Rhodes, the two bulwarks of Christendom, had fallen. Germany was
threatened by Turkish invasions, and for years the bells tolled in
hundreds of German parishes calling the people to pray against the coming
of the Turk. It was not until the heroic defence of Vienna, in 1529, that
the victorious advance of the Moslem was stayed. Only the Adriatic
separated Italy from the Ottoman Empire, and the great mountain wall with
the strip of Dalmatian coast which lies at its foot was the bulwark
between civilisation and barbarism.
§ 2. Consolidation.
In Western Europe, and within the limits affected directly or indirectly
by the Reformation, the distinctive political characteristic of the times
immediately preceding the movement was consolidation or coalescence.
Feudalism, with its liberties and its lawlessness, was disappearing, and
compact nations were being formed under monarchies which tended to become
absolute. If the Scandinavian North be excluded, five nations included
almost the whole field of Western European life, and in all of them the
principle of consolidation is to be seen at work. In three, England,
France, and Spain, there emerged great united kingdoms; and if in two,
Germany and Italy, there was no clustering of the people round one
dynasty, the same principle of coalescence showed itself in the formation
of permanent States which had all the appearance of modern kingdoms.
It is important for our purpose to glance at each and show the principle
at work.
§ 3. England.
By the time that the Duke of Richmond had ascended the English throne and
ruled with “politic governance” as Henry VII., the distinctively modern
history of England had begun. Feudalism had perished on the field of the
battle of Bosworth. The visitations of the Black Death, the gigantic
agricultural labour strike under Wat Tylor and priest Ball, and the
consequent transformation of peasant serfs into a free people working for
wages, had created a new England ready for the changes which were to
bridge the chasm between mediæval and modern history. The consolidation of
the people was favoured by the English custom that the younger sons of the
nobility ranked as commoners, and that the privileges as well as the
estates went to the eldest sons. This kept the various classes of the
population from becoming stereotyped into castes, as in Germany, France,
and Spain. It tended to create an ever-increasing middle class, which was
not confined to the towns, but permeated the country districts also. The
younger sons of the nobility descended into this middle class, and the
transformation of the serfs into a wage-earning class enabled some of them
to rise into it. England was the first land to become a compact
nationality.
The earlier portion of the reign of Henry VII. was not free from attempts
which, if successful, would have thrown the country back into the old
condition of disintegration. Although the king claimed to unite the rival
lines of York and Lancaster, the Yorkists did not cease to raise
difficulties at home which were eagerly fostered from abroad. Ireland was
a Yorkist stronghold, and Margaret, the dowager Duchess of Burgundy, the
sister of Edward IV., exercised a sufficiently powerful influence in
Flanders to make that land a centre of Yorkist intrigue.
Lambert Simnel, a pretender who claimed to be either the son or the nephew
of Edward IV. (his account of himself varied), appeared in Ireland, and
the whole island gathered round him. He invaded England, drew to his
standard many of the old Yorkists, but was defeated at Stoke-on-Trent in
1487. This was really a formidable rebellion. The rising under Perkin
Warbeck, a young Burgundian from Tournay, though supported by Margaret of
Burgundy and James IV. of Scotland, was more easily suppressed. A popular
revolt against severe taxation was subdued in 1497, and it may be said
that Henry’s home difficulties were all over by the year 1500. England
entered the sixteenth century as a compact nation.
The foreign policy of Henry VII. was alliance with Spain and a
long-sighted attempt to secure Scotland by peaceful means. It had for
consequences two marriages which had far-reaching results. The marriage of
Henry’s daughter Margaret with James IV. of Scotland led to the union of
the two crowns three generations later; and that between Katharine, the
third daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and the son of Henry
VII. came to be the occasion, if not the cause, of the revolt of England
from Rome. Katharine was married to Arthur, Prince of Wales, in 1501
(November 14th). Prince Arthur died on January 14th, 1502. After
protracted negotiation, lengthened by the unwillingness of the Pope (Pius
III.) to grant a dispensation, Katharine was contracted to Henry, and the
marriage took place in the year of Prince Henry’s accession to the crown.
Katharine and Henry were crowned together at Westminster on June 28th,
1509.
England had prospered during the reign of the first Tudor sovereign. The
steady increase in wool-growing and wool-exporting is in itself testimony
to the fact that the period of internal wars had ceased, for sheep
speedily become extinct when bands of raiders disturb the country. The
growth in the number of artisan capitalists shows that money had become
the possession of all classes in the community. The rise of the companies
of merchant adventurers proves that England was taking her share in the
world-trade of the new era. English scholars like Grocyn and Linacre
(tutor in Italy of Pope Leo X. and in England of the Prince of Wales) had
imbibed the New Learning in Italy, and had been followed there by John
Colet, who caught the spirit of the Renaissance from the Italian Humanists
and the fervour of a religious revival from Savonarola’s work in Florence.
The country had emerged from Mediævalism in almost everything when Henry
VIII., the hope of the English Humanists and reformers, ascended the
throne in 1509.
§ 4. France.
If England entered on the sixteenth century as the most compact kingdom in
Europe, in the sense that all classes of its society were welded together
more firmly than anywhere else, it may be said of France at the same date
that nowhere was the central authority of the sovereign more firmly
established. Many things had worked for this state of matters. The Hundred
Years’ War with England did for France what the wars against the Moors had
done for Spain. It had created a sense of nationality. It had also made
necessary national armies and the raising of national taxes. During the
weary period of anarchy under Charles VI. every local and provincial
institution of France had seemed to crumble or to display its inefficiency
to help the nation in its sorest need. The one thing which was able to
stand the storms and stress of the time was the kingly authority, and this
in spite of the incapacity of the man who possessed it. The reign of
Charles VII. had made it plain that England was not destined to remain in
possession of French territory; and the succeeding reigns had seen the
central authority slowly acquiring irresistible strength. Charles VII. by
his policy of yielding slightly to pressure and sitting still when he
could—by his inactivity, perhaps masterly,—Louis XI. by his restless,
unscrupulous craft, Anne of Beaujeu (his daughter) by her clear insight
and prompt decision, had not only laid the foundations, but built up and
consolidated the edifice of absolute monarchy in France. The kingly power
had subdued the great nobles and feudatories; it had to a large extent
mastered the Church; it had consolidated the towns and made them props to
its power; and it had made itself the direct lord of the peasants.
The work of consolidation had been as rapid as it was complete. In 1464,
three years after his succession, Louis XI. was confronted by a formidable
association of the great feudatories of France, which called itself the
_League of Public Weal_. Charles of Guyenne, the king’s brother, the Count
of Charolais (known as Charles the Bold of Burgundy), the Duke of
Brittany, the two great families of the Armagnacs, the elder represented
by the Count of Armagnac, and the younger by the Duke of Nemours, John of
Anjou, Duke of Calabria, and the Duke of Bourbon, were allied in arms
against the king. Yet by 1465 Normandy had been wrested from the Duke of
Guyenne; Guyenne itself had become the king’s in 1472; the Duke of Nemours
had been crushed and slain in 1476; the Count of Charolais, become Duke of
Burgundy, had been overthrown, his power shattered, and himself slain by
the Swiss peasant confederates, and almost all his French _fiefs_ had been
incorporated by 1480; and on the death of King René (1480) the provinces
of Anjou and Provence had been annexed to the Crown of France. The great
feudatories were so thoroughly broken that their attempt to revolt during
the earlier years of the reign of Charles VIII. was easily frustrated by
Anne of Beaujeu acting on behalf of the young king.
The efforts to secure hold on the Church date back from the days of the
Council of Basel, when Pope Eugenius was at hopeless issue with the
majority of its members. In 1438 a deputation from the Council waited upon
the king and laid before him the conciliar plans of reform. Charles VII.
summoned an assembly of the French clergy to meet at Bourges. He was
present himself with his principal nobles; and the meeting was also
attended by members of the Council and by papal delegates. There the
celebrated Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges was formally presented and agreed
upon.
This Pragmatic Sanction embodied most of the cherished conciliar plans of
reform. It asserted the ecclesiastical supremacy of Councils over Popes.
It demanded a meeting of a Council every ten years. It declared that the
selection of the higher ecclesiastics was to be left to the Chapters and
to the Convents. It denied the Pope’s general claim to the reservation of
benefices, and greatly limited its use in special cases. It did away with
the Pope’s right to act as Ordinary, and insisted that no ecclesiastical
cases should be appealed to Rome without first having exhausted the lower
courts of jurisdiction. It abolished the _Annates_, with some exceptions
in favour of the present Pope. It also made some attempts to provide the
churches with an educated ministry. All these declarations simply carried
out the proposals of the Council of Basel; but they had an important
influence on the position of the French clergy towards the king. The
Pragmatic Sanction, though issued by an assembly of the French clergy, was
nevertheless a royal ordinance, and thereby gave the king indefinite
rights over the Church within France. The right to elect bishops and
abbots was placed in the hands of Chapters and Convents, but the king and
nobles were expressly permitted to bring forward and recommend candidates,
and this might easily be extended to enforcing the election of those
recommended. Indefinite rights of patronage on the part of the king and of
the nobles over benefices in France could not fail to be the result, and
the French Church could scarcely avoid assuming the appearance of a
national Church controlled by the king as the head of the State. The
abolition of the Pragmatic Sanction was always a bait which the French
king could dangle before the eyes of the Pope, and the promise to maintain
the Pragmatic Sanction was always a bribe to secure the support of the
clergy and the _Parlements_ of France.
In 1516, Francis I. and Leo X. agreed on a Concordat, the practical effect
of which was that the king received the right to nominate to almost all
the higher vacant benefices in France, while the Popes received the
_Annates_. The results were not beneficial to the Church. It left the
clergy a prey to papal exactions, and it compelled them to seek for
promotion through subserviency to the king and the court; but it had the
effect of ranging the monarch on the side of the Papacy when the
Reformation came.
It can scarcely be said that France was a compact nation. The nobility
were separated from the middle and lower classes by the fact that all
younger sons retained the status and privileges of nobles. In ancient
times they had paid no share of the taxes raised for war, on the ground
that they rendered personal service, and the privilege of being free from
taxation was retained long after the services of a feudal militia had
disappeared. The nobility in France became a caste, numerous, poor in many
instances, and too proud to belittle themselves by entering any of the
professions or engaging in commerce.
Louis XI. had done his best to encourage trade, and had introduced the
silkworm industry into France. But as the whole weight of taxation fell
upon the rural districts, the middle classes took refuge in the towns, and
the peasantry, between the dues they had to pay to their lords and the
taxation for the king, were in an oppressed condition. Their grievances
were set forth in the petition they addressed, in the delusive hope of
amelioration, to the States-General which assembled on the accession of
Charles VIII. “During the past thirty-four years,” they say, “troops have
been ever passing through France and living on the poor people. When the
poor man has managed, by the sale of the coat on his back, and after hard
toil, to pay his _taille_, and hopes he may live out the year on the
little he has left, then come fresh troops to his cottage, eating him up.
In Normandy, multitudes have died of hunger. From want of cattle, men and
women have to yoke themselves to the carts; and others, fearing that if
seen in the daytime they will be seized for not having paid their
_taille_, are compelled to work at night. The king should have pity on his
poor people, and relieve them from the said _tailles_ and charges.” This
was in 1483, before the Italian wars had further increased the burdens
which the poorest class of the community had to pay.
The New Learning had begun to filter into France at a comparatively early
date. In 1458 an Italian of Greek descent had been appointed to teach
Greek by the University of Paris. But that University had been for long
the centre of mediæval scholastic study, and it was not until the Italian
campaigns of Charles VIII., who was in Italy when the Renaissance was at
its height, that France may be said to have welcomed the Humanist
movement. A Greek Press was established in Paris in 1507, a group of
French Humanists entered upon the study of the authors of classical
antiquity, and the new learning gradually displaced the old scholastic
disciplines. French Humanists were perhaps the earliest to make a special
study of Roman Law, and to win distinction as eminent jurists. Francis,
like Henry VIII. of England, was welcomed on his accession as a Humanist
king. Such was the condition of France in the beginning of the sixteenth
century.
§ 5. Spain.
Spain had for centuries been under Mohammedan domination. The Moslems had
overrun almost the whole country, and throughout its most fertile
provinces the Christian peasantry lived under masters of an alien faith.
At the beginning of the tenth century the only independent Christian
principalities were small states lying along the southern shore of the Bay
of Biscay and the south-western slopes of the Pyrenees. The Gothic and
Vandal chiefs slowly recovered the northern districts, while the Moors
retained the more fertile provinces of the south. The political conditions
of the country at the close of the fifteenth century inevitably reflected
this gradual reconquest, which had brought the Christian principalities
into existence. In 1474, when Isabella (she had been married in 1469 to
Ferdinand, the heir to Aragon) succeeded her brother Henry IV. in the
sovereignty of Castile, Spain was divided into five separate
principalities: Castile, with Leon, containing 62 per cent.; Aragon, with
Valentia and Catalonia, containing 15 per cent.; Portugal, containing 20
per cent.; Navarre, containing 1 per cent.; and Granada, the only
remaining Moslem State, containing 2 per cent. of the entire surface of
the country.
Castile had grown by almost continuous conquest of lands from the Moslems,
and these additions were acquired in many ways. If they had been made in
what may be termed a national war, the lands seized became the property of
the king, and could be retained by him or granted to his lords spiritual
and temporal under varying conditions. In some cases these grants made the
possessors almost independent princes. On the other hand, lands might be
wrested from the aliens by private adventurers, and in such cases they
remained in possession of the conquerors, who formed municipalities which
had the right of choosing and of changing their overlords, and really
formed independent communities. Then there were, as was natural in a
period of continuous warfare, waste lands. These became the property of
those who settled on them. Lastly, there were the dangerous frontier
lands, which it was the policy of king or great lord who owned them to
people with settlers, who could only be induced to undertake the perilous
occupation provided they received charters (_fueros_), which guaranteed
their practical independence. In such a condition of things the central
authority could not be strong. It was further weakened by the fact that
the great feudatories claimed to have both civil administration and
military rule over their lands, and assumed an almost regal state.
Military religious orders abounded, and were possessed of great wealth.
Their Grand Masters, in virtue of their office, were independent military
commanders, and had great gifts, in the shape of rich commandries, to
bestow on their followers. Their power overshadowed that of the sovereign.
The great ecclesiastics, powerful feudal lords in virtue of their lands,
claimed the rights of civil administration and military rule like their
lay compeers, and, being personally protected by the indefinable sanctity
of the priestly character, were even more turbulent. Almost universal
anarchy had prevailed during the reigns of the two weak kings who preceded
Isabella on the throne of Castile, and the crown lands, the support and
special protection of the sovereign, had been alienated by lavish gifts to
the great nobles. This was the situation which faced the young queen when
she came into her inheritance. It was aggravated by a rebellion on behalf
of Juanna, the illegitimate daughter of Henry IV. The rebellion was
successfully crushed. The queen and her consort, who was not yet in
possession of the throne of Aragon, then tried to give the land security.
The previous anarchy had produced its usual results. The country was
infested with bands of brigands, and life was not safe outside the walls
of the towns. Isabella instituted, or rather revived, the Holy Brotherhood
(_Hermandad_), a force of cavalry raised by the whole country (each group
of one hundred houses was bound to provide one horseman). It was an army
of mounted police. It had its own judges, who tried criminals on the scene
of their crimes, and those convicted were punished by the troops according
to the sentences pronounced. Its avowed objects were to put down all
crimes of violence committed outside the cities, and to hunt criminals who
had fled from the towns’ justice. Its judges superseded the justiciary
powers of the nobles, who protested in vain. The Brotherhood did its work
very effectively, and the towns and the common people rallied round the
monarchy which had given them safety for limb and property.
The sovereigns next attacked the position of the nobles, whose mutual
feuds rendered them a comparatively easy foe to rulers who had proved
their strength of government. The royal domains, which had been alienated
during the previous reign, were restored to the sovereign, and many of the
most abused privileges of the nobility were curtailed.
One by one the Grand Masterships of the Crusading Orders were centred in
the person of the Crown, the Pope acquiescing and granting investiture.
The Church was stripped of some of its superfluous wealth, and the civil
powers of the higher ecclesiastics were abolished or curtailed. In the end
it may be said that the Spanish clergy were made almost as subservient to
the sovereign as were those of France.
The pacification and consolidation of Castile was followed by the conquest
of Granada. The Holy Brotherhood served the purpose of a standing army,
internal feuds among the Moors aided the Christians, and after a
protracted struggle (1481-1492) the city of Granada was taken, and the
Moorish rule in the Peninsula ceased. All Spain, save Portugal and Navarre
(seized by Ferdinand in 1512), was thus united under Ferdinand and
Isabella, the Catholic Sovereigns as they came to be called, and the civil
unity increased the desire for religious uniformity. The Jews in Spain
were numerous, wealthy, and influential. They had intermarried with many
noble families, and almost controlled the finance of the country. It was
resolved to compel them to become Christians, by force if necessary. In
1478 a Bull was obtained from Pope Sixtus IV. establishing the Inquisition
in Spain, it being provided that the inquisitors were to be appointed by
the sovereign. The Holy Office in this way became an instrument for
establishing a civil despotism, as well as a means for repressing heresy.
It did its work with a ruthless severity hitherto unexampled. Sixtus
himself and some of his successors, moved by repeated complaints,
endeavoured to restrain its savage energy; but the Inquisition was too
useful an instrument in the hands of a despotic sovereign, and the Popes
were forced to allow its proceedings, and to refuse all appeals to Rome
against its sentences. It was put in use against the Moorish subjects of
the Catholic kings, notwithstanding the terms of the capitulation of
Granada, which provided for the exercise of civil and religious liberty.
The result was that, in spite of fierce rebellions, all the Moors, save
small groups of families under the special protection of the Crown, had
become nominal Christians by 1502, although almost a century had to pass
before the Inquisition had rooted out the last traces of the Moslem faith
in the Spanish Peninsula.
The death of Isabella in 1504 roughly dates a formidable rising against
this process of repression and consolidation. The severities of the
Inquisition, the insistence of Ferdinand to govern personally the lands of
his deceased wife, and many local causes led to widespread conspiracies
and revolts against his rule. The years between 1504 and 1522 were a
period of revolutions and of lawlessness which was ended when Charles V.,
the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, overcame all resistance and
inaugurated a reign of personal despotism which long distinguished the
kingdom of Spain. Spanish troubles had something to do with preventing
Charles from putting into execution in Germany, as he wished to do, the
ban issued at Worms against Martin Luther.
§ 6. Germany and Italy.
Germany and Italy, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, had made
almost no progress in becoming united and compact nations. The process of
national consolidation, which was a feature of the times, displayed itself
in these lands in the creation of compact principalities rather than in a
great and effective national movement under one sovereign power. It is a
commonplace of history to say that the main reason for this was the
presence within these two lands of the Pope and the Emperor, the twin
powers of the earlier mediæval ideal of a dual government, at once civil
and ecclesiastical. Machiavelli expressed the common idea in his clear and
strenuous fashion. He says that the Italians owe it to Rome that they are
divided into factions and not united as were Spain and France. The Pope,
he explains, who claimed temporal as well as spiritual jurisdiction,
though not strong enough to rule all Italy by himself, was powerful enough
to prevent any other Italian dynasty from taking his place. Whenever he
saw any Italian power growing strong enough to have a future before it, he
invited the aid of some foreign potentate, thus making Italy a prey to
continual invasions. The shadowy lordship of the Pope was sufficient, in
the opinion of Machiavelli, to prevent any real lordship under a native
dynasty within the Italian peninsula. In Germany there was a similar
impotency. The German king was the Emperor, the mediæval head of the Holy
Roman Empire, the “king of the Romans.” Some idea of what underlay the
thought and its expression may be had when one reads across Albert Dürer’s
portrait of Maximilian, “Imperator Cæsar Divus Maximilianus Pius Felix
Augustus,” just as if he had been Trajan or Constantine. The phrase
carries us back to the times when the Teutonic tribes swept down on the
Roman possessions in Western Europe and took possession of them. They were
barbarians with an unalterable reverence for the wider civilisation of the
great Empire which they had conquered. They crept into the shell of the
great Empire and tried to assimilate its jurisprudence and its religion.
Hence it came to pass, in the earlier Middle Ages, as Mr. Freeman says,
“The two great powers in Western Europe were the Church and the Empire,
and the centre of each, in imagination at least, was Rome. Both of these
went on through the settlements of the German nations, and both in a
manner drew new powers from the change of things. Men believed more than
ever that Rome was the lawful and natural centre of the world. For it was
held that there were of divine right two Vicars of God upon earth, the
Roman Emperor, His Vicar in temporal things, and the Roman Bishop, His
Vicar in spiritual things. This belief did not interfere with the
existence either of separate commonwealths, principalities, or of national
Churches. But it was held that the Roman Emperor, who was the Lord of the
World, was of right the head of all temporal States, and the Roman Bishop,
the Pope, was the head of all the Churches.” This idea was a devout
imagination, and was never actually and fully expressed in fact. No
Eastern nation or Church ever agreed with it; and the temporal lordship of
the Emperors was never completely acknowledged even in the West. Still it
ruled in men’s minds with all the force of an ideal. As the modern nations
of Europe came gradually into being, the real headship of the Emperor
became more and more shadowy. But both headships could prevent the
national consolidation of the countries, Germany and Italy, in which the
possessors dwelt. All this is, as has been said, a commonplace of history,
and, like all commonplaces, it contains a great deal of truth. Still it
may be questioned whether the mediæval idea was solely responsible for the
disintegration of either Germany or Italy in the sixteenth century. A
careful study of the conditions of things in both countries makes us see
that many causes were at work besides the mediæval idea—conditions
geographical, social, and historical. Whatever the causes, the
disintegration of these two lands was in marked contrast to the
consolidation of the three other nations.
§ 7. Italy.
In the end of the fifteenth century, Italy contained a very great number
of petty principalities and five States which might be called the great
powers of Italy—Venice, Milan, and Florence in the north, Naples in the
south, and the States of the Church in the centre. Peace was kept by a
delicate and highly artificial balance of powers. Venice was a commercial
republic, ruled by an oligarchy of nobles. The city in the lagoons had
been founded by trembling fugitives fleeing before Attila’s Huns, and was
more than a thousand years old. It had large territories on the mainland
of Italy, and colonies extending down the east coast of the Adriatic and
among the Greek islands. It had the largest revenue of all the Italian
States, but its expenses were also much the heaviest. Milan came next in
wealth, with its yearly income of over 700,000 ducats. At the close of the
century it was in the possession of the Sforza family, whose founder had
been born a ploughman, and had risen to be a formidable commander of
mercenary soldiers. It was claimed by Maximilian as a fief of the Empire,
and by the Kings of France as a heritage of the Dukes of Orleans. The
disputed heritage was one of the causes of the invasion of Italy by
Charles VIII. Florence, the most cultured city in Italy, was, like Venice,
a commercial republic; but it was a democratic republic, wherein one
family, the Medici, had usurped almost despotic power while preserving all
the external marks of republican rule.
Naples was the portion of Italy where the feudal system of the Middle Ages
had lingered longest. The old kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Naples and
Sicily) had, since 1458, been divided, and Sicily had been politically
separated from the mainland. The island belonged to the King of Aragon;
while the mainland had for its ruler the illegitimate son of Alphonso of
Aragon, Ferdinand, or Ferrante, who proved a despotic and masterful ruler.
He had crushed his semi-independent feudal barons, had brought the towns
under his despotic rule, and was able to hand over a compact kingdom to
his son Alphonso in 1494.
The feature, however, in the political condition of Italy which
illustrated best the general tendency of the age towards coalescence, was
the growth of the States of the Church. The dominions which were directly
under the temporal power of the Pope had been the most disorganised in all
Italy. The vassal barons had been turbulently independent, and the Popes
had little power even within the city of Rome. The helplessness of the
Popes to control their vassals perhaps reached its lowest stage in the
days of Innocent VIII. His successors Alexander VI. (Rodrigo Borgia,
1492-1503), Julius II. (Cardinal della Rovere, 1503-1513), and Leo X.
(Giovanni de Medici, 1513-1521), strove to create, and partly succeeded in
forming, a strong central dominion, the States of the Church. The troubled
times of the French invasions, and the continual warfare among the more
powerful States of Italy, furnished them with the occasion. They pursued
their policy with a craft which brushed aside all moral obligations, and
with a ruthlessness which hesitated at no amount of bloodshed. In their
hands the Papacy appeared to be a merely temporal power, and was treated
as such by contemporary politicians. It was one of the political States of
Italy, and the Popes were distinguished from their contemporary Italian
rulers only by the facts that their spiritual position enabled them to
exercise a European influence which the others could not aspire to, and
that their sacred character placed them above the obligations of ordinary
morality in the matter of keeping solemn promises and maintaining treaty
obligations made binding by the most sacred oaths. In one sense their aim
was patriotic. They were Italian princes whose aim was to create a strong
Italian central power which might be able to maintain the independence of
Italy against the foreigner; and in this they were partially successful,
whatever judgment may require to be passed on the means taken to attain
their end. But the actions of the Italian prince placed the spiritual Head
of the Church outside all those influences, intellectual, artistic, and
religious (the revival under Savonarola in Florence), which were working
in Italy for the regeneration of European society. The Popes of the
Renaissance set the example, only too faithfully followed by almost every
prince of the age, of believing that political far outweighed all moral
and religious motives.
§ 8. Germany.
Germany, or the Empire, as it was called, included, in the days of the
Reformation, the Low Countries in the north-west and most of what are now
the Austro-Hungarian lands in the east. It was in a strange condition. On
the one hand a strong popular sentiment for unity had arisen in all the
German-speaking portions, and on the other the country was cut into
sections and slices, and was more hopelessly divided than was Italy
itself.
Nominally the Empire was ruled over by one supreme lord, with a great
feudal assembly, the Diet, under him.
The Empire was elective, though for generations the rulers chosen had
always been the heads of the House of Hapsburg, and since 1356 the
election had been in the hands of seven prince-electors—three on the Elbe
and four on the Rhine. On the Elbe were the King of Bohemia, the Elector
of Saxony, and the Elector of Brandenburg; on the Rhine, the Count
Palatine of the Rhine and the Archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Köln.
This Empire, nominally one, and full of the strongest sentiments of unity,
was hopelessly divided, and—for this was the peculiarity of the
situation—all the elements making for peaceful government, which in
countries like France or England supported the central power, were on the
side of disunion.
A glance at the map of Germany in the times of the Reformation shows an
astonishing multiplicity of separate principalities, ecclesiastical and
secular, all the more bewildering that most of them appeared to be
composed of patches lying separate from each other. Almost every ruling
prince had to cross some neighbour’s land to visit the outlying portions
of his dominions. It must also be remembered that the divisions which can
be represented on a map but faintly express the real state of things. The
territories of the imperial cities—the lands outside the walls ruled by
the civic fathers—were for the most part too small to figure on any map,
and for the same reason the tiny principalities of the hordes of free
nobles are also invisible. So we have to imagine all those little mediæval
republics and those infinitesimal kingdoms camped on the territories of
the great princes, and taking from them even the small amount of unity
which the map shows.
The greater feudal States, Electoral and Ducal Saxony, Brandenburg,
Bavaria, the Palatinate, Hesse, and many others, had meetings of their own
Estates,—Councils of subservient nobles and lawyers,—their own Supreme
Courts of Justice, from which there was no appeal, their own fiscal
system, their own finance and coinage, and largely controlled their clergy
and their relations to powers outside Germany. Their princes, hampered as
they were by the great Churchmen, thwarted continually by the town
republics, defied by the free nobles, were nevertheless actual kings, and
profited by the centralising tendencies of the times. They alone in
Germany represented settled central government, and attracted to
themselves the smaller units lying outside and around them.
Yet with all these divisions, having their roots deep down in the past,
there was pervading all classes of society, from princes to peasants, the
sentiment of a united Germany, and no lack of schemes to convert the
feeling into fact. The earliest practical attempts began with the union of
German Churchmen at Constance and the scheme for a National Church of
Germany; and the dream of ecclesiastical unity brought in its train the
aspiration after political oneness.
The practical means proposed to create a German national unity over lands
which stretched from the Straits of Dover to the Vistula, and from the
Baltic to the Adriatic, were the proclamation of a universal Land’s Peace,
forbidding all internecine war between Germans; the establishment of a
Supreme Court of Justice to decide quarrels within the Empire; a common
coinage, and a common Customs Union. To bind all more firmly together
there was needed a Common Council or governing body, which, under the
Emperor, should determine the Home and Foreign Policy of the Empire. The
only authorities which could create a governmental unity of this kind were
the Emperor on the one hand and the great princes on the other, and the
two needed to be one in mutual confidence and in intention. But that is
what never happened, and all through the reign of Maximilian and in the
early years of Charles we find two different conceptions of what the
central government ought to be—the one oligarchic and the other
autocratic. The princes were resolved to keep their independence, and
their plans for unity always implied a governing oligarchy with serious
restraint placed on the power of the Emperor; while the Emperors, who
would never submit to be controlled by an oligarchy of German princes, and
who found that they could not carry out their schemes for an autocratic
unity, were at least able to wreck any other.
The German princes have been accused of preferring the security and
enlargement of their dynastic possessions to the unity of the Empire, but
it can be replied that in doing so they only followed the example set them
by their Emperors. Frederick III., Maximilian, and Charles V. invariably
neglected imperial interests when they clashed with the welfare of the
family possessions of the House of Hapsburg. When Maximilian inherited the
imperial Burgundian lands, a fief of the Empire, through his marriage with
Mary, the heiress of Charles the Bold, he treated the inheritance as part
of the family estates of his House. The Tyrol was absorbed by the House of
Hapsburg when the Swabian League prevented Bavaria seizing it (1487). The
same fate fell on the Duchy of Austria when Vienna was recovered, and on
Hungary and Bohemia; and when Charles V. got hold of Würtemberg on the
outlawry of Duke Ulrich, it, too, was detached from the Empire and
absorbed into the family possessions of the Hapsburgs. There was, in
short, a persistent policy pursued by three successive Emperors, of
despoiling the Empire in order to increase the family possessions of the
House to which they belonged.
The last attempt to give a constitutional unity to the German Empire was
made at the Diet of Worms (1521)—the Diet before which Luther appeared.
There the Emperor, Charles V., agreed to accept a _Reichsregiment_, which
was in all essential points, though differing in some details, the same as
his grandfather Maximilian had proposed to the Diet of 1495. The Central
Council was composed of a President and four members appointed by the
Emperor, six Electors (the King of Bohemia being excluded), who might sit
in person or by deputies, and twelve members appointed by the rest of the
Estates. The cities were not represented. This _Reichsregiment_ was to
govern all German lands, including Austria and the Netherlands, but
excluding Bohemia. Switzerland, hitherto nominally within the Empire,
formally withdrew and ceased to form part of Germany. The central
government needed funds to carry on its work, and especially to provide an
army to enforce its decisions; and various schemes for raising the money
required were discussed at its earlier meetings. It was resolved at last
to raise the necessary funds by imposing a tax of four per cent. on all
imports and exports, and to establish custom-houses on all the frontiers.
The practical effect of this was to lay the whole burden of taxation upon
the mercantile classes, or, in other words, to make the cities, who were
not represented in the _Reichsregiment_, pay for the whole of the central
government. This _Reichsregiment_ was to be simply a board of advice,
without any decisive control so long as the Emperor was in Germany. When
he was absent from the country it had an independent power of government.
But all important decisions had to be confirmed by the absent Emperor,
who, for his part, promised to form no foreign leagues involving Germany
without the consent of the Council.
As soon as the _Reichsregiment_ had settled its scheme of taxation, the
cities on which it was proposed to lay the whole burden of providing the
funds required very naturally objected. They met by representatives at
Speyer (1523), and sent delegates to Spain, to Valladolid, where Charles
happened to be, to protest against the scheme of taxation. They were
supported by the great German capitalists. The Emperor received them
graciously, and promised to take the government into his own hands. In
this way the last attempt to give a governmental unity to Germany was
destroyed by the joint action of the Emperor and of the cities. It is
unquestionable that the Reformation under Luther did seriously assist in
the disintegration of Germany, but it must be remembered that a movement
cannot become national where there is no nation, and that German
nationality had been hopelessly destroyed just at the time when it was
most needed to unify and moderate the great religious impulses which were
throbbing in the hearts of its citizens.
Maximilian had been elected King of the Romans in 1486, and had succeeded
to the Empire on the death of his father, Frederick III., in 1493. His was
a strongly fascinating personality—a man full of enthusiasms, never
lacking in ideas, but singularly destitute of the patient practical power
to make them workable. He may almost be called a type of that Germany over
which he was called to rule. No man was fuller of the longing for German
unity as an ideal; no man did more to perpetuate the very real divisions
of the land.
He was the patron of German learning and of German art, and won the
praises of the German Humanists: no ruler was more celebrated in
contemporary song. He protected and supported the German towns, encouraged
their industries, and fostered their culture. In almost everything ideal
he stood for German nationality and unity. He placed himself at the head
of all those intellectual and artistic forces from which spread the
thought of a united Germany for the Germans. On the other hand, his one
persistent practical policy, and the only one in which he was almost
uniformly successful, was to unify and consolidate the family possessions
of the House of Hapsburg. In this policy he was the leader of those who
broke up Germany into an aggregate of separate and independent
principalities. The greater German princes followed his example, and did
their best to transform themselves into the civilised rulers of modern
States.
Maximilian died somewhat unexpectedly on January 12th, 1519, and five
months were spent in intrigues by the partisans of Francis of France and
young Charles, King of Spain, the grandson of Maximilian. The French party
believed that they had secured by bribery a majority of the Electors; and
when this was whispered about, the popular feeling in favour of Charles,
on account of his German blood, soon began to manifest itself. It was
naturally strongest in the Rhine provinces. Papal delegates could not get
the Rhine skippers to hire boats to them for their journey, as it was
believed that the Pope favoured the French king. The Imperial Cities
accused Francis of fomenting internecine war in Germany, and displayed
their hatred of his candidature. The very Landsknechten clamoured for the
grandson of their “Father” Maximilian. The eyes of all Germany were turned
anxiously enough to the venerable town of Frankfurt-on-the-Main, where,
according to ancient usage, the Electors met to select the ruler of the
Holy Roman Empire. On the 28th of June (1519) the alarm bell of the town
gave the signal, and the Electors assembled in their scarlet robes of
State in the dim little chapel of St. Bartholomew, where the conclave was
always held. The manifestation of popular feeling had done its work.
Charles was unanimously chosen, and all Germany rejoiced,—the good
burghers of Frankfurt declaring that if the Electors had chosen Francis
they would have been “playing with death.”
It was a wave of national excitement, the desire for a _German_ ruler,
that had brought about the unanimous election; and never were a people
more mistaken and, in the end, disappointed. Charles was the heir of the
House of Hapsburg, the grandson of Maximilian, his veins full of German
blood. But he was no German. Maximilian was the last of the real German
Hapsburgs. History scarcely shows another instance where the mother’s
blood has so completely changed the character of a race. Charles was his
mother’s son, and her Spanish characteristics showed themselves in him in
greater strength as the years went on. When he abdicated, he retired to
end his days in a Spanish convent. It was the Spaniard, not the German,
who faced Luther at Worms.
Chapter III. The Renaissance.(16)
§ 1. The Transition from the Mediæval to the Modern World.
The movement called the Renaissance, in its widest extent, may be
described as the transition from the mediæval to the modern world. All our
present conceptions of life and thought find their roots within this
period.
It saw the beginnings of modern science and the application of true
scientific methods to the investigation of nature. It witnessed the
astronomical discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, the foundation of
anatomy under Vessalius, and the discovery of the circulation of the blood
by Harvey.
It was the age of geographical explorations. The discoveries of the
telescope, the mariner’s compass, and gunpowder gave men mastery over
previously unknown natural forces, and multiplied their powers, their
daring, and their capacities for adventure. When these geographical
discoveries had made a world-trade a possible thing, there began that
change from mediæval to modern methods in trade and commerce which lasted
from the close of the fourteenth to the beginning of the seventeenth
century, when the modern commercial conditions were thoroughly
established. The transition period was marked by the widening area of
trade, which was no longer restricted to the Mediterranean, the Black and
the North Seas, to the Baltic, and to the east coasts of Africa. The rigid
groups of artisans and traders—the guild system of the Middle Ages—began
to dissolve, and to leave freer space for individual and new corporate
effort. Prices were gradually freed from official regulation, and became
subject to the natural effects of bargaining. Adventure companies were
started to share in the world-trade, and a beginning was made of dealing
on commissions. All these changes belong to the period of transition
between the mediæval and the modern world.
In the art of governing men the Renaissance was the age of political
concentration. In two realms—Germany and Italy—the mediæval conceptions of
Emperor and Pope, world-king and world-priest, were still strong enough to
prevent the union of national forces under one political head; but there,
also, the principle of coalescence may be found in partial operation,—in
Germany in the formation of great independent principalities, and in Italy
in the growth of the States of the Church,—and its partial failure
subjected both nationalities to foreign oppression. Everywhere there was
the attempt to assert the claims of the secular powers to emancipate
themselves from clerical tutelage and ecclesiastical usurpation. While,
underlying all, there was the beginning of the assertion of the supreme
right of individual revolt against every custom, law, or theory which
would subordinate the man to the caste or class. The Swiss peasantry began
it when they made pikes by tying their scythes to their alpenstocks, and,
standing shoulder to shoulder at Morgarten and Sempach, broke the fiercest
charges of mediæval knighthood. They proved that man for man the peasant
was as good as the noble, and individual manhood asserted in this rude and
bodily fashion soon began to express itself mentally and morally.
In jurisprudence the Renaissance may be described as the introduction of
historical and scientific methods, the abandonment of legal fictions based
upon collections of false decretals, the recovery of the true text of the
Roman code, and the substitution of civil for canon law as the basis of
legislation and government. There was a complete break with the past. The
substitution of civil law based upon the lawbooks of Justinian for the
canon law founded upon the Decretum of Gratian, involved such a breach in
continuity that it was the most momentous of all the changes of that
period of transition. For law enters into every human relation, and a
thorough change of legal principles must involve a revolution which is
none the less real that it works almost silently. The codes of Justinian
and of Theodosius completely reversed the teachings of the canonists, and
the civilian lawyers learned to look upon the Church as only a department
of the State.
In literature there was the discovery of classical manuscripts, the
introduction of the study of Greek, the perception of the beauties of
language in the choice and arrangement of words under the guidance of
classical models. The literary powers of modern languages were also
discovered,—Italian, English, French, and German,—and with the discovery
the national literatures of Europe came into being.
In art a complete revolution was effected in architecture, painting, and
sculpture by the recovery of ancient models and the study of the
principles of their construction.
The manufacture of paper, the discovery of the arts of printing and
engraving, multiplied the possession of the treasures of the intelligence
and of artistic genius, and combined to make art and literature
democratic. What was once confined to a favoured few became common
property. New thoughts could act on men in masses, and began to move the
multitude. The old mediæval barriers were broken down, and men came to see
that there was more in religion than the mediæval Church had taught, more
in social life than feudalism had manifested, and that knowledge was a
manifold unknown to their fathers.
If the Renaissance be the transition from the mediæval to the modern
world,—and it is scarcely possible to regard it otherwise,—then it is one
of those great movements of the mind of mankind that almost defy exact
description, and there is an elusiveness about it which confounds us when
we attempt definition. “It was the emancipation of the reason,” says
Symonds, “in a race of men, intolerant of control, ready to criticise
canons of conduct, enthusiastic of antique liberty, freshly awakened to
the sense of beauty, and anxious above all things to secure for themselves
free scope in spheres outside the region of authority. Men so vigorous and
independent felt the joy of exploration. There was no problem they feared
to face, no formula they were not eager to recast according to their new
conceptions.”(17) It was the blossoming and fructifying of the European
intellectual life; but perhaps it ought to be added that it contained a
new conception of the universe in which religion consisted less in a
feeling of dependence on God, and more in a faith on the possibilities
lying in mankind.
§ 2. The Revival of Literature and Art.
But the Renaissance has generally a more limited meaning, and one defined
by the most potent of the new forces which worked for the general
intellectual regeneration. It means the revival of learning and of art
consequent on the discovery and study of the literary and artistic
masterpieces of antiquity. It is perhaps in this more limited sense that
the movement more directly prepared the way for the Reformation and what
followed, and deserves more detailed examination. It was the discovery of
a lost means of culture and the consequent awakening and diffusion of a
literary, artistic, and critical spirit.
A knowledge of ancient Latin literature had not entirely perished during
the earlier Middle Ages. The Benedictine monasteries had preserved
classical manuscripts—especially the monastery of Monte Cassino for the
southern, and that of Fulda for the northern parts of Europe. These
monasteries and their sister establishments were schools of learning as
well as libraries, and we read of more than one where the study of some of
the classical authors was part of the regular training. Virgil, Horace,
Terence and Martial, Livy, Suetonius and Sallust, were known and studied.
Greek literature had not survived to anything like the same extent, but it
had never entirely disappeared from Southern Europe, and especially from
Southern Italy. Ever since the days of the Roman Republic in that part of
the Italian peninsula once called Magna Græcia, Greek had been the
language of many of the common people, as it is to this day, in districts
of Calabria and of Sicily; and the teachers and students of the mediæval
University of Salerno had never lost their taste for its study.(18) But
with all this, the fourteenth century, and notably the age of Petrarch,
saw the beginnings of new zeal for the literature of the past, and was
really the beginning of a new era.
Italy was the first land to become free from the conditions of mediæval
life, and ready to enter on the new life which was awaiting Europe. There
was an Italian language, the feeling of distinct nationality, a
considerable advance in civilisation, an accumulation of wealth, and,
during the age of the despots, a comparative freedom from constant changes
in political conditions.
Dante’s great poem, interweaving as it does the imagery and mysticism of
Giacchino di Fiore, the deepest spiritual and moral teaching of the
mediæval Church, and the insight and judgment on men and things of a great
poet, was the first sign that Italy had wakened from the sleep of the
Middle Ages. Petrarch came next, the passionate student of the lives, the
thoughts, and emotions of the great masters of classical Latin literature.
They were real men for him, his own Italian ancestors, and they as he had
felt the need of Hellenic culture to solace their souls, and serve for the
universal education of the human race. Boccaccio, the third leader in the
awakening, preached the joy of living, the universal capacity for
pleasure, and the sensuous beauty of the world. He too, like Petrarch,
felt the need of Hellenic culture. For both there was an awakening to the
beauty of literary form, and the conviction that a study of the ancient
classics would enable them to achieve it. Both valued the vision of a new
conception of life derived from the perusal of the classics, freer, more
enlarged and joyous, more rational than the Middle Ages had witnessed.
Petrarch and Boccaccio yearned after the life thus disclosed, which gave
unfettered scope to the play of the emotions, to the sense of beauty, and
to the manifold activity of the human intelligence.
Learned Greeks were induced to settle in Italy—men who were able to
interpret the ancient Greek poets and prose writers—Manuel Chrysoloras (at
Florence, 1397-1400), George of Trebizond, Theodore Gaza (whose Greek
_Grammar_ Erasmus taught from while in England), Gemistos Plethon, a
distinguished Platonist, under whom the Christian Platonism received its
impulse, and John Argyropoulos, who was the teacher of Reuchlin. The men
of the early Renaissance were their pupils.
§ 3. Its earlier relation to Christianity.
There was nothing hostile to Christianity or to the mediæval Church in the
earlier stages of this intellectual revival, and very little of the
neo-paganism which it developed afterwards. Many of the instincts of
mediæval piety remained, only the objects were changed. Petrarch revered
the MS. of Homer, which he could not read, as an ancestor of his might
have venerated the scapulary of a saint.(19) The men of the early
Renaissance made collections of MSS. and inscriptions, of cameos and of
coins, and worshipped them as if they had been relics. The Medicean
Library was formed about 1450, the Vatican Library in 1453, and the age of
passionate collection began.
The age of scholarship succeeded, and Italian students began to interpret
the ancient classical authors with a mysticism all their own. They sought
a means of reconciling Christian thought with ancient pagan philosophy,
and, like Clement of Alexandria and Origen, discovered it in Platonism.
Platonic academies were founded, and Cardinal Bessarion, Marsiglio Ficino,
and Pico della Mirandola became the Christian Platonists of Italy. Of
course, in their enthusiasm they went too far. They appropriated the whole
intellectual life of a pagan age, and adopted its ethical as well as its
intellectual perceptions, its basis of sensuous pleasures, and its joy in
sensuous living. Still their main thought was to show that Hellenism as
well as Judaism was a pathway to Christianity, and that the Sibyl as well
as David was a witness for Christ.
The Papacy lent its patronage to the revival of literature and art, and
put itself at the head of the movement of intellectual life. Pope Nicolas
V. (1447-1455) was the first Bishop of Rome who fostered the Renaissance,
and he himself may be taken as representing the sincerity, the simplicity,
and the lofty intellectual and artistic aims of its earliest period.
Sprung from an obscure family belonging to Saranza, a small town near
Spezzia, and cast on his own resources before he had fairly quitted
boyhood, he had risen by his talents and his character to the highest
position in the Church. He had been private tutor, secretary, librarian,
and through all a genuine lover of books. They were the only personal
luxury he indulged in, and perhaps no one in his days knew more about
them. He was the confidential adviser of Lorenzo de Medici when he founded
his great library in San Marco. He himself began the Vatican Library. He
had agents who ransacked the monasteries of Europe, and he collected the
literary relics which had escaped destruction in the sack of
Constantinople. Before his death his library in the Vatican contained more
than 5000 MSS. He gathered round him a band of illustrious artists and
scholars. He filled Rome with skilled and artistic artisans, with
decorators, jewellers, workers in painted glass and embroidery. The famous
Leo Alberti was one of his architects, and Fra Angelico one of his
artists. Laurentius Valla and Poggio Bracciolini, Cardinal Bessarion and
George of Trebizond, were among his scholars. He directed and inspired
their work. Valla’s critical attacks on the Donation of Constantine, and
on the tradition that the Twelve had dictated the Apostles’ Creed, did not
shake his confidence in the scholar. The principal Greek authors were
translated into Latin by his orders. Europe saw theology, learning, and
art lending each other mutual support under the leadership of the head of
the Church. Perhaps Julius II. (1503-1513) conceived more definitely than
even Nicolas had done that one duty of the head of the Church was to
assume the leadership of the intellectual and artistic movement which was
making wider the thought of Europe,—only his restless energy never
permitted him leisure to give effect to his conception. “The instruction
which Pope Julius II. gave to Michelangelo to represent him as Moses can
bear but one interpretation: that Julius set himself the mission of
leading forth Israel (the Church) from its state of degradation, and
showing it—though he could not grant possession—the Promised Land at least
from afar, that blessed land which consists in the enjoyment of the
highest intellectual benefits, and the training and consecration of all
the faculties of man’s mind to union with God.”(20)
The classical revival in Italy soon exhausted itself. Its sensuous
perceptions degenerated into sensuality, its instinct for the beauty of
expression into elegant trifling, and its enthusiasm for antiquity into
neo-paganism. It failed almost from the first in real moral earnestness;
scarcely saw, and still less understood, how to cure the deep-seated moral
evils of the age.
Italy had given birth to the Renaissance, but it soon spread to the more
northern lands. Perhaps France first felt the impulse, then Germany and
England last of all. In dealing with the Reformation, the movement in
Germany is the most important.
The Germans, throughout the Middle Ages, had continuous and intimate
relations with the southern peninsula, and in the fifteenth century these
were stronger than ever. German merchants had their factories in Venice
and Genoa; young German nobles destined for a legal or diplomatic career
studied law at Italian universities; students of medicine completed their
studies in the famous southern schools; and the German wandering student
frequently crossed the Alps to pick up additional knowledge. There was
such constant scholarly intercourse between Germany and Italy, that the
New Learning could not fail to spread among the men of the north.
§ 4. The Brethren of the Common Lot.
Germany and the Low Countries had been singularly prepared for that
revival of letters, art, and science which had come to Italy. One of the
greatest gifts bestowed by the Mystics of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries on their native land had been an excellent system of school
education. Gerard Groot, a disciple of the Flemish mystic Jan van
Rysbroeck, had, after long consultations with his Master, founded a
brotherhood called the _Brethren of the Common Life_,(21) whose aim was to
better the religious condition of their fellow-men by the multiplication
of good books and by the careful training of the young. They were to
support themselves by copying and selling manuscripts. All the houses of
the Brethren had a large room, where a number of scribes sat at tables, a
reader repeated slowly the words of the manuscript, and books were
multiplied as rapidly as was possible before the invention of printing.
They filled their own libraries with the best books of Christian and pagan
antiquity. They multiplied small tracts containing the mystical and
practical theology of the _Friends of God_, and sent them into circulation
among the people. One of the intimate followers of Groot, Florentius
Radewynsohn, proved to be a distinguished educationalist, and the schools
of the Order soon became famous. The Brethren, to use the words of their
founder, employed education for the purpose of “raising spiritual pillars
in the Temple of the Lord.” They insisted on a study of the Vulgate in
their classes; they placed German translations of Christian authors in the
hands of their pupils; they took pains to give them a good knowledge of
Latin, and read with them selections from the best known ancient authors;
they even taught a little Greek; and their scholars learned to sing the
simpler, more evangelical Latin hymns.
The mother school was at Deventer, a town situated at the south-west
corner of the great episcopal territory of Utrecht, now the Dutch province
of Ober-Yessel. It lies on the bank of that branch of the Rhine (the
Yessel) which flowing northwards glides past Zutphen, Deventer, Zwolle,
and loses itself in the Zuyder Zee at Kampen. A large number of the more
distinguished leaders of the fifteenth century owed their early training
to this great school at Deventer. During the last decades of the fifteenth
century the headmaster was Alexander Hegius (1433-1498), who came to
Deventer in 1471 and remained there until his death.(22) The school
reached its height of fame under this renowned master, who gathered 2000
pupils around him,—among them Erasmus, Conrad Mutti (Mutianus Rufus),
Hermann von Busch, Johann Murmellius,—and, rejecting the older methods of
grammatical instruction, taught them to know the niceties of the Latin
tongue by leading them directly to the study of the great writers of
classical antiquity. He was such an indefatigable student that he kept
himself awake during the night-watches, it is said, by holding in his
hands the candle which lighted him, in order to be wakened by its fall
should slumber overtake him. The glory of Deventer perished with this
great teacher, who to the last maintained the ancient traditions of the
school by his maxim, that learning without piety was rather a curse than a
blessing.
Other famous schools of the Brethren in the second half of the fifteenth
century were Schlettstadt,(23) in Elsass, some miles from the west bank of
the Rhine, and about half-way between Strassburg and Basel; Munster on the
Ems, the Monasterium of the earlier Middle Ages; Emmerich, a town on the
Rhine near the borders of Holland, and Altmarck, in the north-west.
Schlettstadt, under its master Ludwig Dringenberg, almost rivalled the
fame of Deventer, and many of the members of the well-known Strassburg
circle which gathered round Jacob Wimpheling, Sebastian Brand, and the
German Savonarola, John Geiler von Keysersberg, had been pupils in this
school. Besides these more famous establishments, the schools of the
Brethren spread all over Germany. The teachers were commonly called the
_Roll-Brueder_, and under this name they had a school in Magdeburg to
which probably Luther was sent when he spent a year in that town. Their
work was so pervading and their teaching so effectual, that we are
informed by chroniclers, who had nothing to do with the Brethren, that in
many German towns, girls could be heard singing the simpler Latin hymns,
and that the children of artisans could converse in Latin.
§ 5. German Universities, Schools, and Scholarship.
The desire for education spread all over Germany in the fifteenth century.
Princes and burghers vied with each other in erecting seats of learning.
Within one hundred and fifty years no fewer than seventeen new
universities were founded. Prag, a Bohemian foundation, came into
existence in 1348. Then followed four German foundations, Vienna, in 1365
or 1384; Heidelberg, in 1386; Köln, in 1388; and Erfurt, established by
the townspeople, in 1392. In the fifteenth century there were Leipzig, in
1409; Rostock, on the shore of what was called the East Sea, almost
opposite the south point of Sweden, in 1419; Cracow, a Polish foundation,
in 1420; Greifswald, in 1456; Freiburg and Trier, in 1457; Basel, in 1460;
Ingolstadt, founded with the special intention of training students in
obedience to the Pope, a task singularly well accomplished, in 1472;
Tübingen and Mainz, in 1477; Wittenberg, in 1502; and
Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, in 1507. Marburg, the first Reformation University,
was founded in 1527.
The craving for education laid hold on the burgher class, and towns vied
with each other in providing superior schools, with teachers paid out of
the town’s revenues. Some German towns had several such foundations.
Breslau, “the student’s paradise,” had seven. Nor was the education of
girls neglected. Frankfurt-on-the-Main founded a high school for girls
early in the fifteenth century, and insisted that the teachers were to be
learned ladies who were not nuns.(24) Besides the classrooms, the towns
usually provided hostels, where the boys got lodging and sometimes
firewood (they were expected to obtain food by begging through the streets
of the town), and frequently hospitals where the scholars could be tended
in illness.(25)
These possibilities of education attracted boys from all parts of the
country, and added a new class of vagrants to the tramps of all kinds who
infested the roads during the later Middle Ages. The wandering scholar,
with his yellow scarf, was a feature of the era, and frequently not a
reputable one. He was usually introduced as a character into the
_Fastnachtspiele_, or rude popular carnival comedies, and was almost
always a rogue and often a thief. Children of ten and twelve years of age
left their villages, in charge of an older student, to join some famous
school. But these older students were too often mere vagrants, with just
learning enough to impose upon the simple peasantry, to whom they sold
charms against toothache and other troubles. The young children entrusted
to them by confiding parents were often treated with the greatest cruelty,
employed by them to beg or steal food, and sent round to the public-houses
with cans to beg for beer. The small unfortunates were the prisoners, the
slaves, of their disreputable masters, and many of them died by the
roadside. We need not wonder that Luther, with his memory full of these
wandering students, in after days denounced the system by which men spent
sometimes “twenty and even forty years” in a so-called student life, which
was often one of the lowest vagrancy and debauchery, and in the end knew
neither German nor Latin, “to say nothing,” he adds with honest
indignation, “of the shameful and vicious life by which our worthy youth
have been so grievously corrupted.” Two or three of the autobiographies of
these wandering students have survived; and two of them, those of Thomas
Platter and of Johann Butzbach, belong to Luther’s time, and give a vivid
picture of their lives.(26)
Germany had no lack of schools and universities, but it can scarcely be
said that they did more than serve as a preparation for the entrance of
the Renaissance movement. During the fifteenth century all the
Universities were under the influence of the Church, and Scholasticism
prescribed the methods of study. Very little of the New Learning was
allowed to enter. It is true that if Köln and perhaps Ingolstadt be
excepted, the Scholastic which was taught represented what were supposed
to be the more advanced opinions—those of John Duns Scotus, William of
Occam, and Gabriel Biel, rather than the learning of Thomas Aquinas and
other great defenders of papal traditions; but it lent itself as
thoroughly as did the older Scholastic to the discussion of all kinds of
verbal and logical subtleties. Knowledge of every kind was discussed under
formulæ and phrases sanctioned by long scholastic use. It is impossible to
describe the minute distinctions and the intricate reasoning based upon
them without exceeding the space at our disposal. It is enough to say that
the prevailing course of study furnished an imposing framework without
much solid content, and provided an intellectual gymnastic without much
real knowledge. A survival can be seen in the Formal Logic still taught.
The quantity of misspent ingenuity called forth to produce the figures and
moods, and bestowed on discovering and arranging all possible moods under
each figure and in providing all with mnemonic names,—_Barbara, Celarent,
Darii, Ferioque prioris_, etc.,—affords some insight into the scholastic
methods in use in these universities of the fifteenth century.
Then it must be remembered that the scholarship took a
quasi-ecclesiastical form. The universities were all monastic
institutions, where the teachers were professional and the students
amateur celibates. The scholars were gathered into hostels in which they
lived with their teachers, and were taught to consider themselves very
superior persons. The statutes of mediæval Oxford declare that God created
“clerks” with gifts of intelligence denied to mere lay persons; that it
behoved “clerks” to exhibit this difference by their outward appearance;
and that the university tailors, whose duty it was to make men
_extrinsecus_ what God had made them _intrinsecus_, were to be reckoned as
members of the University. Those mediæval students sometimes assumed airs
which roused the passions of the laity, and frequently led to tremendous
riots. Thus in 1513 the townsfolk of Erfurt battered in the gates of the
University with cannon, and after the flight of the professors and
students destroyed almost all the archives and library. About the same
time some citizens of Vienna having jeered at the sacred student dress,
there ensued the “Latin war,” which literally devastated the town. This
pride of separation between “clerks” and laity culminated in the great
annual procession, when the newly capped graduates, clothed in all the
glory of new bachelors’ and masters’ gowns and hoods, marched through the
principal streets of the university town, in the midst of the university
dignitaries and frequently attended by the magistrates in their robes.
Young Luther confessed that when he first saw the procession at Erfurt he
thought that no position on earth was more enviable than that of a newly
capped graduate.
Mediæval ecclesiastical tradition brooded over all departments of
learning; and the philosophy and logic, or what were supposed to be the
philosophy and logic, of Aristotle ruled that tradition. The reverence for
the name of Aristotle almost took the form of a religious fervour. In a
curious mediæval _Life of Aristotle_ the ancient pagan thinker is declared
to be a forerunner of Christ. All who refused to accept his guidance were
heretics, and his formal scheme of thought was supposed to justify the
refined sophisms of mediæval dialectic. His system of thought was the
fortified defence which preserved the old and protected it from the
inroads of the New Learning. Hence the hatred which almost all the German
Humanists seem to have had for the name of Aristotle. The attitudes of the
partisans of the old and of the new towards the ancient Greek thinker are
represented in two pictures, each instinct with the feeling of the times.
In one, in the church of the Dominicans in Pisa, Aristotle is represented
standing on the right with Plato on the left of Thomas Aquinas, and rays
streaming from their opened books make a halo round the head of the great
mediæval theologian and thinker. In the other, a woodcut published by Hans
Holbein the younger in 1527, Aristotle with the mediæval doctors is
represented descending into the abodes of darkness, while Jesus Christ
stands in the foreground and points out the true light to a crowd of
people, among whom the artist has figured peasants with their flails.
§ 6. The earlier German Humanists.
When the beginnings of the New Learning made their appearance in Germany,
they did not bring with them any widespread revival of culture. There was
no outburst, as in Italy, of the artistic spirit, stamping itself upon
such arts as painting, sculpture, and architecture, which could appeal to
the whole public intelligence. The men who first felt the stirrings of the
new intellectual life were, for the most part, students who had been
trained in the more famous schools of the _Brethren of the Common Life_,
all of whom had a serious aim in life. The New Learning appealed to them
not so much a means of self-culture as an instrument to reform education,
to criticise antiquated methods of instruction, and, above all, to effect
reforms in the Church and to purify the social life. One of the most
conspicuous of such scholars was Cardinal Nicolas Cusanus(27) (1401-1464).
He was a man of singularly open mind, who, while he was saturated with the
old learning, was able to appreciate the new. He had studied the classics
in Italy. He was an expert mathematician and astronomer. Some have even
asserted that he anticipated the discoveries of Galileo. The instruments
with which he worked, roughly made by a village tinsmith, may still be
seen preserved in the Brother-house which he founded at his birthplace,
Cues, on the Mosel; and there, too, the sheets, covered with his long
calculations for the reform of the calendar, may still be studied.
Another scholar, sent out by the same schools, was John Wessel of
Gröningen (1420-1489), who wandered in search of learning from Köln to
Paris and from Paris to Italy. He finally settled down as a canon in the
Brotherhood of Mount St. Agnes. There he gathered round him a band of
young students, whom he encouraged to study Greek and Hebrew. He was a
theologian who delighted to criticise the current opinions on theological
doctrines. He denied that the fire of Purgatory could be material fire,
and he theorised about indulgences in such a way as to be a forerunner of
Luther.(28) “If I had read his books before,” said Luther, “my enemies
might have thought that Luther had borrowed everything from Wessel, so
great is the agreement between our spirits. I feel my joy and my strength
increase, I have no doubt that I have taught aright, when I find that one
who wrote at a different time, in another clime, and with a different
intention, agrees so entirely in my view and expresses it in almost the
same words.”
Other like-minded scholars might be mentioned, Rudolph Agricola(29)
(1442-1485), Jacob Wimpheling(30) (1450-1528), and Sebastian Brand
(1457-1521), who was town-clerk of Strassburg from 1500, and the author of
the celebrated _Ship of Fools_, which was translated into many languages,
and was used by his friend Geiler of Keysersberg as the text for one of
his courses of popular sermons.
All these men, and others like-minded and similarly gifted, are commonly
regarded as the precursors of the German Renaissance, and are classed
among the German Humanists. Yet it may be questioned whether they can be
taken as the representatives of that kind of Humanism which gathered round
Luther in his student days, and of which Ulrich von Hutten, the stormy
petrel of the times of the Reformation, was a notable example. Its
beginnings must be traced to other and less reputable pioneers. Numbers of
young German students, with the talent for wandering and for supporting
themselves by begging possessed by so many of them, had tramped down to
Italy, where they contrived to exist precariously while they attended,
with a genuine thirst for learning, the classes taught by Italian
Humanists. There they became infected with the spirit of the Italian
Renaissance, and learned also to despise the ordinary restraints of moral
living. There they imbibed a contempt for the Church and for all kinds of
theology, and acquired the genuine temperament of the later Italian
Humanists, which could be irreligious without being anti-religious, simply
because religion of any sort was something foreign to their nature.
Such a man was Peter Luders (1415-1474). He began life as an ecclesiastic,
wandered down into Italy, where he devoted himself to classical studies,
and where he acquired the irreligious disposition and the disregard for
ordinary moral living which disgraced a large part of the later Italian
Humanists. While living at Padua (1444), where he acted as private tutor
to some young Germans from the Palatinate, he was invited by the Elector
to teach Latin in the University of Heidelberg. The older professors were
jealous of him: they insisted on reading and revising his introductory
lecture: they refused him the use of the library; and in general made his
life a burden. He struggled on till 1460. Then he spent many years in
wandering from place to place, teaching the classics privately to such
scholars as he could find. He was not a man of reputable life, was greatly
given to drink, a free liver in every way, and thoroughly irreligious,
with a strong contempt for all theology. He seems to have contrived when
sober to keep his heretical opinions to himself, but to have betrayed
himself occasionally in his drinking bouts. When at Basel he was accused
of denying the doctrine of Three Persons in the Godhead, and told his
accusers that he would willingly confess to four if they would only let
him alone. He ended his days as a teacher of medicine in Vienna.
History has preserved the names of several of these wandering scholars who
sowed the seeds of classical studies in Germany, and there were,
doubtless, many who have been forgotten. Loose living, irreligious, their
one gift a genuine desire to know and impart a knowledge of the ancient
classical literature, careless how they fared provided only they could
study and teach Latin and Greek, they were the disreputable apostles of
the New Learning, and in their careless way scattered it over the northern
lands.
§ 7. The Humanist Circles in the Cities.
The seed-beds of the German Renaissance were at first not so much the
Universities, as associations of intimates in some of the cities. Three
were pre-eminent,—Strassburg, Augsburg, and Nürnberg,—all wealthy imperial
cities, having intimate relations with the imperial court on the one hand
and with Italy on the other.
The Humanist circle at Nürnberg was perhaps the most distinguished, and it
stood in closer relations than any other with the coming Reformation. Its
best known member was Willibald Pirkheimer(31) (1470-1528), whose training
had been more that of a young Florentine patrician than of the son of a
German burgher. His father, a wealthy Nürnberg merchant of great
intellectual gifts and attainments, a skilled diplomatist, and a
confidential friend of the Emperor Maximilian, superintended his son’s
education. He took the boy with him on the journeys which trade or the
diplomatic business of his city compelled him to make, and initiated him
into the mysteries of commerce and of German politics. The lad was also
trained in the knightly accomplishments of horsemanship and the skilful
use of weapons. He was sent, like many a young German patrician, to Padua
and Pavia (1490-1497) to study jurisprudence and the science of diplomacy,
and was advised not to neglect opportunities to acquire the New Learning.
When he returned, in his twenty-seventh year, he was appointed one of the
counsellors of the city, and was entrusted with an important share in the
management of its business. In this capacity it was necessary for him to
make many a journey to the Diet or to the imperial court, and he soon
became a favourite with the Emperor Maximilian, who rejoiced in converse
with a mind as versatile as his own. No German so nearly approached the
many-sided culture of the leading Italian Humanists as did this citizen of
Nürnberg. On the other hand, he possessed a fund of earnestness which no
Italian seems to have possessed. He was deeply anxious about reformation
in Church and State, and after the Leipzig disputation had shown that
Luther’s quarrel with the Pope was no mere monkish dispute, but went to
the roots of things, he was a sedate supporter of the Reformation in its
earlier stages. His sisters Charitas and Clara, both learned ladies, were
nuns in the Convent of St. Clara at Nürnberg. The elder, who was the
abbess of her convent, has left an interesting collection of letters, from
which it seems probable that she had great influence over her brother, and
prevented him from joining the Lutheran Church after it had finally
separated from the Roman obedience.
Pirkheimer gave the time which was not occupied with public affairs to
learning and intercourse with scholars. His house was a palace filled with
objects of art. His library, well stocked with MSS. and books, was open to
every student who came with an introduction to its owner. At his banquets,
which were famous, he delighted to assemble round his table the most
distinguished men of the day. He was quite at home in Greek, and made
translations from the works of Plato, Xenophon, Plutarch, and Lucian into
Latin or German. The description which he gives, in his familiar letters
to his sisters and intimate friends, of his life on his brother-in-law’s
country estate is like a picture of the habits of a Roman patrician of the
fifth century in Gaul. The morning was spent in study, in reading Plato or
Cicero; and in the afternoon, if the gout chanced to keep him indoors, he
watched from his windows the country people in the fields, or the
sportsman and the fisher at their occupations. He was fond of entertaining
visitors from the neighbourhood. Sometimes he gathered round him his upper
servants or his tenants, with their wives and families. The evening was
usually devoted to the study of history and archæology, in both of which
he was greatly interested. He was in the habit of sitting up late at
night, and when the sky was clear he followed the motions of the planets
with a telescope; for, like many others in that age, he had faith in
astrology, and believed that he could read future events and the destinies
of nations in the courses of the wandering stars.
In all those civic circles, poets and artists were found as members—Hans
Holbein at Augsburg; Albert Dürer, with Hans Sebaldus Beham, at Nürnberg.
The contemporary Italian painters, when they ceased to select their
subjects from Scripture or from the Lives of the Saints, turned
instinctively to depict scenes from the ancient pagan mythology. The
German artists strayed elsewhere. They turned for subjects to the common
life of the people. But the change was gradual. The Virgin ceased to be
the Queen of Heaven and became the purest type of homely human motherhood,
and the attendant angels, sportive children plucking flowers, fondling
animals, playing with fruit. In Lucas Cranach’s “Rest on the Flight to
Egypt” two cherubs have climbed a tree to rob a bird’s nest, and the
parent birds are screaming at them from the branches. In one of Albert
Dürer’s representations of the Holy Family, the Virgin and Child are
seated in the middle of a farmyard, surrounded by all kinds of rural
accessories. Then German art plunged boldly into the delineation of the
ordinary commonplace life—knights and tournaments, merchant trains, street
scenes, pictures of peasant life, and especially of peasant dances,
university and school scenes, pictures of the camp and of troops on the
march. The coming revolution in religion was already proclaiming that all
human life, even the most commonplace, could be sacred; and contemporary
art discovered the picturesque in the ordinary life of the people—in the
castles of the nobles, in the markets of the cities, and in the villages
of the peasants.
§ 8. Humanism in the Universities.
The New Learning made its way gradually into the Universities. Classical
scholars were invited to lecture or settle as private teachers in
university towns, and the students read Cicero and Virgil, Horace and
Propertius, Livy and Sallust, Plautus and Terence. One of the earliest
signs of the growing Humanist feeling appeared in changes in one of the
favourite diversions of German students. In all the mediæval Universities
at carnival time the students got up and performed plays. The subjects
were almost invariably taken from the Scriptures or from the Apocrypha.
Chaucer says of an Oxford student, that
“Sometimes to shew his lightnesse and his mastereye
He played Herod on a gallows high.”
At the end of the fifteenth century the subjects changed, and students’
plays were either reproductions from Plautus or Terence, or original
compositions representing the common life of the time.
The legal recognition of Humanism within a University commonly showed
itself in the institution of a lectureship of Poetry or Oratory—for the
German Humanists were commonly known as the “Poets.” Freiburg established
a chair of Poetry in 1471, and Basel in 1474; in Tübingen the stipend for
an Orator was legally sanctioned in 1481, and Conrad Celtis was appointed
to a chair of Poetry and Eloquence in 1492.
Erfurt, however, was generally regarded as the special nursery of German
university Humanism ever since Peter Luders had taught there in 1460. From
that date the University never lacked Humanist teachers, and a Humanist
circle had gradually grown up among the successive generations of
students. The permanent chief of this circle was a German scholar, whose
name was Conrad Mut (Mudt, Mutta, and Mutti are variations), who Latinised
his name into Mutianus, and added Rufus because he was red-haired. This
Mutianus Rufus was in many respects a typical German Humanist. He was born
in 1472 at Homburg in Hesse, had studied at Deventer under Alexander
Hegius, had attended the University of Erfurt, and had then gone to Italy
to study law and the New Learning. He became a Doctor of Laws of Bologna,
made friends among many of the distinguished Italian Humanists, and had
gained many patrons among the cardinals in Rome. He finally settled in
Gotha, where he had received a canonry in the Church. He did not win any
distinction as an author, but has left behind him an interesting
collection of letters. His great delight was to gather round him promising
young students belonging to the University of Erfurt, to superintend their
reading, and to advise them in all literary matters. While in Italy he had
become acquainted with Pico della Mirandola, and had adopted the
conception of combining Platonism and Christianity in an eclectic
mysticism, which was to be the esoteric Christianity for thinkers and
educated men, while the popular Christianity, with its superstitions, was
needed for the common herd. Christianity, he taught, had its beginnings
long before the historical advent of our Lord. “The true Christ,” he said,
“was not a man, but the Wisdom of God; He was the Son of God, and is
equally imparted to the Jews, the Greeks, and the Germans.”(32) “The true
Christ is not a man, but spirit and soul, which do not manifest themselves
in outward appearance, and are not to be touched or seized by the
hands.”(33) “The law of God,” he said in another place, “which enlightens
the soul, has two heads: to love God, and to love one’s neighbour as one’s
self. This law makes us partakers of Heaven. It is a natural law; not hewn
in stone, as was the law of Moses; not carved in bronze, as was that of
the Romans; not written on parchment or paper, but implanted in our hearts
by the highest Teacher.” “Whoever has eaten in pious manner this memorable
and saving Eucharist, has done something divine. For the true Body of
Christ is peace and concord, and there is no holier Host than neighbourly
love.”(34) He refused to believe in the miraculous, and held that the
Scriptures were full of fables, meant, like those of Æsop, to teach moral
truths. He asserted that he had devoted himself to “God, the saints, and
the study of all antiquity”; and the result was expressed in the following
quotation from a letter to Urban (1505), one of his friends and pupils at
Erfurt: “There is but one god and one goddess; but there are many forms
and many names—Jupiter, Sol, Apollo, Moses, Christ, Luna, Ceres,
Proserpina, Tellus, Mary. But do not spread it abroad; we must keep
silence on these Eleusinian mysteries. In religious matters we must employ
fables and enigmas as a veil. Thou who hast the grace of Jupiter, the best
and greatest God, shouldst in secret despise the little gods. When I say
Jupiter, I mean Christ and the true God. But enough of these things, which
are too high for us.”(35) Such a man looked with contempt on the Church of
his age, and lashed it with his scorn. “I do not revere the coat or the
beard of Christ; I revere the true and living God, who has neither beard
nor coat.”(36) In private he denounced the fasts of the Church,
confession, and masses for the dead, and called the begging friars “cowled
monsters.” He says sarcastically of the Christianity of his times: “We
mean by faith not the conformity of what we say with fact, but an opinion
about divine things founded on credulity and a persuasion which seeks
after profit. Such is its power that it is commonly believed that to us
were given the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whoever, therefore, despises
our keys, shall feel our nails and our clubs (_quisquis claves contemserit
clavum et clavam sentiet_). We have taken from the breast of Serapis a
magical stamp to which Jesus of Galilee has given authority. With that
figure we put our foes to flight, we cozen money, we consecrate God, we
shake hell, and we work miracles; whether we be heavenly minded or earthly
minded makes no matter, provided we sit happily at the banquet of
Jupiter.”(37) But he did not wish to revolt from the external authority of
the Church of the day. “He is impious who wishes to know more than the
Church. We bear on our forehead,” he says, “the seal of the Cross, the
standard of our King. Let us not be deserters; let nothing base be found
in our camp.”(38) The authority which the Humanists revolted against was
merely intellectual, as was the freedom they fought for. It did not belong
to their mission to proclaim a spiritual freedom or to free the common man
from his slavish fear of the mediæval priesthood; and this made an
impassable gulf between their aspirations and those of Luther and the real
leaders of the Reformation movement.(39)
The Erfurt circle of Humanists had for members Heinrich Urban, to whom
many of the letters of Mutianus were addressed, Petreius Alperbach, who
won the title of “mocker of gods and men” (_derisor deorum et hominum_),
Johann Jaeger of Dornheim (Crotus Rubeanus), George Burkhardt from Spalt
(Spalatinus), Henry and Peter Eberach. Eoban of Hesse (Helius Eobanus
Hessus), the most gifted of them all, and the hardest drinker, joined the
circle in 1494.
Similar university circles were formed elsewhere: at Basel, where Heinrich
Loriti from Glarus (Glareanus), and afterwards Erasmus, were the
attractions; at Tübingen, where Heinrich Bebel, author of the _Facetiæ_,
encouraged his younger friends to study history; and even at Köln, where
Hermann von Busch, a pupil of Deventer, and Ortuin Gratius, afterwards the
butt of the authors of the _Epistolæ obscurorum virorum_, were looked upon
as leaders full of the New Learning.
As in Italy Popes and cardinals patronised the leaders of the Renaissance,
so in Germany the Emperor and some princes gave their protection to
Humanism. To German scholars, who were at the head of the new movement,
Maximilian seemed to be an ideal ruler. His coffers no doubt were almost
always empty, and he had not lucrative posts at his command to bestow upon
them; the position of court poet given to Conrad Celtes and afterwards to
Ulrich von Hutten brought little except coronation in presence of the
imperial court with a tastefully woven laurel crown;(40) but the character
of Maximilian attracted peasantry and scholars alike. His romanticism, his
abiding youthfulness, his amazing intellectual versatility, his
knight-errantry, and his sympathy fascinated them. Maximilian lives in the
folk-song of Germany as no other ruler does. The scheme of education sung
in the _Weisskunig_, and illustrated by Hans Burgmaier, entitled him to
the name “the Humanist Emperor.”
§ 9. Reuchlin.
The German Humanists, whether belonging to the learned societies of the
cities or to the groups in the Universities, were too full of
individuality to present the appearance of a body of men leagued together
under the impulse of a common aim. The Erfurt band of scholars was called
“the Mutianic Host”; but the partisans of the New Learning could scarcely
be said to form a solid phalanx. Something served, however, to bring them
all together. This was the persecution of Reuchlin.
Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522), like Erasmus after him, was very much a man
by himself. He entered history at first dramatically enough. A party of
Italian Humanists had met in the house of John Argyropoulos in Rome in
1483. Among them was a young unknown German, who had newly arrived with
letters of introduction to the host. He had come, he explained, to study
Greek. Argyropoulos gave him a Thucydides and asked him to construe a page
or two into Latin. Reuchlin construed with such ease and elegance, that
the company exclaimed that Greece had flown across the Alps to settle in
Germany. The young German spent some years in Italy, enjoying the
friendship of the foremost Italian scholars. He was an ardent student of
the New Learning, and on his return was the first to make Greek thoroughly
popular in Germany. But he was a still more ardent student of Hebrew, and
it may almost be said of him that he introduced that ancient language to
the peoples of Europe. His _De Rudimentis Hebraicis_ (1506), a grammar and
dictionary in one, was the first book of its kind. His interest in the
language was more than that of a student. He believed that Hebrew was not
only the most ancient, but the holiest of languages. God had spoken in it.
He had revealed Himself to men not merely in the Hebrew writings of the
Old Testament, but had also imparted, through angels and other divine
messengers, a hidden wisdom which has been preserved in ancient Hebrew
writings outside of the Scriptures,—a wisdom known to Adam, to Noah, and
to the Patriarchs. He expounded his strange mystical theosophy in a
curious little book, _De Verbo Mirifico_ (1494), full of out-of-the-way
learning, and finding sublime mysteries in the very points of the Hebrew
Scriptures. Perhaps his central thought is expressed in the sentence, “God
is love; man is hope; the bond between them is faith.... God and man may
be so combined in an indescribable union that the human God and the divine
man may be considered as one being.”(41) The book is a _Symposium_ where
Sidonius, Baruch, and Capnion (Reuchlin) hold prolonged discourse with
each other.
Reuchlin was fifty-four years of age when a controversy began which
gradually divided the scholars of Germany into two camps, and banded the
Humanists into one party fighting in defence of free inquiry.
John Pfefferkorn (1469-1522), born a Jew and converted to Christianity
(1505), animated with the zeal of a convert to bring the Jews wholesale to
Christianity, and perhaps stimulated by the Dominicans of Köln (Cologne),
with whom he was closely associated, conceived an idea that his former
co-religionists might be induced to accept Christianity if all their
peculiar books, the Old Testament excepted, were confiscated. During the
earlier Middle Ages the Jews had been continually persecuted, and their
persecution had always been popular; but the fifteenth century had been a
period of comparative rest for them; they had bought the imperial
protection, and their services as physicians had been gratefully
recognised in Frankfurt and many other cities.(42) Still the popular
hatred against them as usurers remained, and manifested itself in every
time of social upheaval. It was always easy to arouse the slumbering
antipathy.
Pfefferkorn had written four books against the Jews (_Judenspiegel_,
_Judenbeichte_, _Osternbuch_, _Jeudenfeind_) in the years 1507-1509, in
which he had suggested that the Jews should be forbidden to practise
usury, that they should be compelled to listen to sermons, and that their
Hebrew books should be confiscated. He actually got a mandate from the
Emperor Maximilian, probably through some corrupt secretary, empowering
him to seize upon all such books. He began his work in the Rhineland, and
had already confiscated the books of many Jews, when, in the summer of
1509, he came to Reuchlin and requested his aid. The scholar not only
refused, but pointed out some irregularities in the imperial mandate. The
doubtful legality of the imperial order had also attracted the attention
of Uriel, the Archbishop of Mainz, who forbade his clergy from rendering
Pfefferkorn any assistance.
Upon this Pfefferkorn and the Dominicans again applied to the Emperor, got
a second mandate, then a third, which was the important one. It left the
matter in the hands of the Archbishop of Mainz, who was to collect
evidence on the subject of Jewish books. He was to ask the opinions of
Reuchlin, of Victor von Karben (1422-1515), who had been a Jew but was
then a Christian priest, of James Hochstratten (1460-1527), a Dominican
and Inquisitor to the diocese of Köln, a strong foe to Humanism, and of
the Universities of Heidelberg, Erfurt, Köln, and Mainz. They were to
write out their opinions and send them to Pfefferkorn, who was to present
them to the Emperor. Reuchlin was accordingly asked by the Archbishop to
advise the Emperor “whether it would be praiseworthy and beneficial to our
holy religion to destroy such books as the Jews used, excepting only the
books of the Ten Commandments of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalter of
the Old Testament?” Reuchlin’s answer was ready by November 1510. He went
into the matter very thoroughly and impartially. He divided the books of
the Jews into several classes, and gave his opinion on each. It was out of
the question to destroy the Old Testament. The Talmud was a collection of
expositions of the Jewish law at various periods; no one could express an
opinion about it unless he had read it through; Reuchlin had only been
able to procure portions; judging from these, it was likely that the book
did contain many things contrary to Christianity, but that was the nature
of the Jewish religion which was protected by law; it did contain many
good things, and ought not to be destroyed. The Cabala was, according to
Reuchlin, a very precious book, which assured us as no other did of the
divinity of Christ, and ought to be carefully preserved. The Jews had
various commentaries on the books of the Old Testament which were very
useful to enable Christian scholars to understand them rightly, and they
ought not to be destroyed. They had also sermons and ceremonial books
belonging to their religion which had been guaranteed by imperial law.
They had books on arts and sciences which ought to be destroyed only in so
far as they taught such forbidden arts as magic. Lastly, there were books
of poetry and fables, and some of them might contain insults to Christ,
the Virgin, and the Apostles, and might deserve burning, but not without
careful and competent examination. He added that the best way to deal with
the Jews was not to burn their books, but to engage in reasonable, gentle,
and kindly discussion.
Reuchlin’s opinion stood alone: all the other authorities suggested the
burning of Jewish books, and the University of Mainz would not exempt the
Old Testament until it had been shown that it had not been tampered with
by Jewish zealots.
The temperate and scholarly answer of Reuchlin was made a charge against
him. The controversy which followed, and which lasted for six weary years,
was so managed by the Dominicans, that Reuchlin, a Humanist and a layman,
was made to appear as defying the theologians of the Church on a point of
theology. Like all mediæval controversies, it was conducted with great
bitterness and no lack of invective, frequently coarse enough. The
Humanists saw, however, that it was the case of a scholar defending
genuine scholarship against obscurantists, and, after a fruitless
endeavour to get Erasmus to lead them, they joined in a common attack.
Artists also lent their aid. In one contemporary engraving, Reuchlin is
seated in a car decked with laurels, and is in the act of entering his
native town of Pforzheim. The Köln theologians march in chains before the
car; Pfefferkorn lies on the ground with an executioner ready to
decapitate him; citizens and their wives in gala costume await the hero,
and the town’s musicians salute him with triumphant melody; while one
worthy burgher manifests his sympathy by throwing a monk out of a window.
The other side of the controversy is represented by a rough woodcut, in
which Pfefferkorn is seen breaking the chair of scholarship in which a
double-tongued Reuchlin is sitting.(43) The most notable contribution to
the dispute, however, was the publication of the famous _Epistolæ
Obscurorum Virorum_, inseparably connected with the name of Ulrich von
Hutten.
§ 10. The “Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum.”
While the controversy was raging (1514), Reuchlin had collected a series
of testimonies to his scholarship, and had published them under the title
of _Letters from Eminent Men_.(44) This suggested to some young Humanist
the idea of a collection of letters in which the obscurantists could be
seen exposing themselves and their unutterable folly under the parodied
title of _Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum_. The book bears the same relation
to the scholastic disputations of the later fifteenth century that _Don
Quixote_ does to the romances of mediæval chivalry. It is a farrago of
questions on grammar, etymology, graduation precedence, life in a country
parsonage, and scholastic casuistry. Magister Henricus Schaffsmulius
writes from Rome that he went one Friday morning to breakfast in the Campo
dei Fiori, ordered an egg, which on being opened contained a chicken.
“Quick,” said his companion, “swallow it, or the landlord will charge the
chicken in the bill.” He obeyed, forgetting that the day was Friday, on
which no flesh could be eaten lawfully. In his perplexity he consulted one
theologian, who told him to keep his mind at rest, for an embryo chicken
within an egg was like the worms or maggots in fruit and cheese, which men
can swallow without harm to their souls even in Lent. But another, equally
learned, had informed him that maggots in cheese and worms in fruit were
to be classed as fish, which everyone could eat lawfully on fast days, but
that an embryo chicken was quite another thing—it was flesh. Would the
learned Magister Ortuin, who knew everything, decide for him and relieve
his burdened conscience? The writers send to their dear Magister Ortuin
short Latin poems of which they are modestly proud. They confess that
their verses do not scan; but that matters little. The writers of secular
verse must be attentive to such things; but their poems, which relate the
lives and deeds of the saints, do not need such refinements. The writers
confess that at times their lives are not what they ought to be; but
Solomon and Samson were not perfect; and they have too much Christian
humility to wish to excel such honoured Christian saints. The letters
contain a good deal of gossip about the wickedness of the poets
(Humanists). These evil men have been speaking very disrespectfully about
the Holy Coat at Trier (Treves); they have said that the Blessed Relics of
the Three Kings at Köln are the bones of three Westphalian peasants. The
correspondents exchange confidences about sermons they dislike. One
preacher, who spoke with unseemly earnestness, had delivered a plain
sermon without any learned syllogisms or intricate theological reasoning;
he had spoken simply about Christ and His salvation, and the strange thing
was that the people seemed to listen to him eagerly: such preaching ought
to be forbidden. Allusions to Reuchlin and his trial are scattered all
through the letters, and the writers reveal artlessly their hopes and
fears about the result. It is possible, one laments, that the rascal may
get off after all: the writer hears that worthy Inquisitor Hochstratten’s
money is almost exhausted, and that he has scarcely enough left for the
necessary bribery at Rome; it is to be hoped that he will get a further
supply. It is quite impossible to translate the epistles and retain the
original flavour of the language,—a mixture of ecclesiastical phrases,
vernacular idioms and words, and the worst mediæval Latin. Of course, the
letters contain much that is very objectionable: they attack the character
of men, and even of women; but that was an ordinary feature of the
Humanism of the times. They were undoubtedly successful in covering the
opponents of Reuchlin with ridicule, more especially when some of the
obscurantists failed to see the satire, and looked upon the letters as
genuine accounts of the views they sympathised with. Some of the mendicant
friars in England welcomed a book against Reuchlin, and a Dominican prior
in Brabant bought several copies to send to his superiors.
The authorship of these famous letters is not thoroughly known; probably
several Humanist pens were at work. It is generally admitted that they
came from the Humanist circle at Erfurt, and that the man who planned the
book and wrote most of the letters was John Jaeger of Dornheim (Crotus
Rubeanus). They were long ascribed to Ulrich von Hutten; some of the
letters may have come from his pen—one did certainly. These _Epistolæ
Obscurorum Virorum_, when compared with the _Encomium Moriæ_ of Erasmus,
show how immeasurably inferior the ordinary German Humanist was to the
scholar of the Low Countries.(45)
§ 11. Ulrich von Hutten.
Ulrich von Hutten,(46) the stormy petrel of the Reformation period in
Germany, was a member of one of the oldest families of the Franconian
nobles—a fierce, lawless, turbulent nobility. The old hot family blood
coursed through his veins, and accounts for much in his adventurous
career. He was the eldest son, but his frail body and sickly disposition
marked him out in his father’s eyes for a clerical life. He was sent at
the age of eleven to the ancient monastery of Fulda, where his precocity
in all kinds of intellectual work seemed to presage a distinguished
position if he remained true to the calling to which his father had
destined him. The boy, however, soon found that he had no vocation for the
Church, and that, while he was keenly interested in all manner of studies,
he detested the scholastic theology. He appealed to his father, told him
how he hated the thought of a clerical life, and asked him to be permitted
to look forward to the career of a scholar and a man of letters. The old
Franconian knight was as hard as men of his class usually were. He
promised Ulrich that he could take as much time as he liked to educate
himself, but that in the end he was to enter the Church. Upon this,
Ulrich, an obstinate chip of an obstinate block, determined to make his
escape from the monastery and follow his own life. How he managed it is
unknown. He fell in with John Jaeger of Dornheim, and the two wandered,
German student fashion, from University to University; they were at Köln
together, then at Erfurt. The elder Hutten refused to assist his son in
any way. How the young student maintained himself no one knows. He had
wretched health; he was at least twice robbed and half-murdered by
ruffians as he tramped along the unsafe highways; but his indomitable
purpose to live the life of a literary man or to die sustained him. At
last family friends patched up a half-hearted reconciliation between
father and son. They pointed out that the young man’s abilities might find
scope in a diplomatic career since the Church was so distasteful to him,
and the father was induced to permit him to go to Italy, provided he
applied himself to the study of law. Ulrich went gladly to the land of the
New Learning, reached Pavia, struggled on to Bologna, found that he liked
law no better than theology, and began to write. It is needless to follow
his erratic career. He succeeded frequently in getting patrons; but he was
not the man to live comfortably in dependence; he always remembered that
he was a Franconian noble; he had an irritable temper,—his wretched health
furnishing a very adequate excuse.
It is probable that his sojourn in Italy did as much for him as for
Luther, though in a different way. The Reformer turned with loathing from
Italian, and especially from Roman wickedness. The Humanist meditated on
the greatness of the imperial idea, now, he thought, the birthright of his
Germany, which was being robbed of it by the Papacy. Henceforward he was
dominated by one persistent thought.
He was a Humanist and a poet, but a man apart, marked out from among his
fellows, destined to live in the memories of his nation when their names
had been forgotten. They might be better scholars, able to write a finer
Latinity, and pen trifles more elegantly; but he was a man with a purpose.
His erratic and by no means pure life was ennobled by his sincere, if
limited and unpractical, patriotism. He wrought, schemed, fought,
flattered, and apostrophised to create a united Germany under a reformed
Emperor. Whatever hindered this was to be attacked with what weapons of
sarcasm, invective, and scorn were at his command; and the _one_ enemy was
the Papacy of the close of the fifteenth century, and all that it implied.
It was the Papacy that drained Germany of gold, that kept the Emperor in
thraldom, that set one portion of the land against the other, that gave
the separatist designs of the princes their promise of success. The Papacy
was his Carthage, which must be destroyed.
Hutten was a master of invective, fearless, critically destructive; but he
had small constructive faculty. It is not easy to discover what he meant
by a reformation of the Empire—something loomed before him vague, grand, a
renewal of an imagined past. Germany might be great, it is suggested in
the _Inspicientes_ (written in 1520), if the Papacy were defied, if the
princes were kept in their proper place of subordination, if a great
imperial army were created and paid out of a common imperial fund,—an army
where the officers were the knights, and the privates a peasant infantry
(_landsknechts_). It is the passion for a German Imperial Unity which we
find in all Hutten’s writings, from the early _Epistola ad Maximilianum
Cæsarem Italiæ fictitia_, the _Vadiscus, or the Roman Triads_, down to the
_Inspicientes_—not the means whereby this is to be created. He was a born
foeman, one who loved battle for battle’s sake, who could never get enough
of fighting,—a man with the blood of his Franconian ancestors coursing
hotly through his veins. Like them, he loved freedom in all
things—personal, intellectual, and religious. Like them, he scorned ease
and luxury, and despised the burghers, with their love of comfort and
wealth. He thought much more highly of the robber-knights than of the
merchants they plundered. Germany, he believed, would come right if the
merchants and the priests could be got rid of. The robbers were even
German patriots who intercepted the introduction of foreign merchandise,
and protected the German producers in securing the profits due to them for
their labour.
Hutten is usually classed as an ally of Luther’s, and from the date of the
Leipzig Disputation (1519), when Luther first attacked the Roman Primacy,
he was an ardent admirer of the Reformer. But he had very little sympathy
with the deeper religious side of the Reformation movement. He regarded
Luther’s protest against Indulgences in very much the same way as did Pope
Leo X. It was a contemptible monkish dispute, and all sensible men, he
thought, ought to delight to see monks devour one another. “I lately said
to a friar, who was telling me about it,” he writes, “ ‘Devour one
another, that ye may be consumed one of another.’ It is my desire that our
enemies (the monks) may live in as much discord as possible, and may be
always quarrelling among themselves.” He attached himself vehemently to
Luther (and Hutten was always vehement) only when he found that the monk
stood for freedom of conscience (_The Liberty of a Christian Man_) and for
a united Germany against Rome (_To the Christian Nobility of the German
Nation respecting the Reformation of the Christian Estate_). As we study
his face in the engravings which have survived, mark his hollow cheeks,
high cheek-bones, long nose, heavy moustache, shaven chin, whiskers
straggling as if frayed by the helmet, and bold eyes, we can see the rude
Franconian noble, who by some strange freak of fortune became a scholar, a
Humanist, a patriot, and, in his own way, a reformer.
Chapter IV. Social Conditions.(47)
§ 1. Towns and Trade.
It has been already said that the times of the Renaissance were a period
of transition in the social as well as in the intellectual condition of
the peoples of Europe. The economic changes were so great, that no
description of the environment of the Reformation would be complete
without some account of the social revolution which was slowly
progressing. It must be remembered, however, that there is some danger in
making the merely general statements which alone are possible in this
chapter. The economic forces at work were modified and changed in
countries and in districts, and during decades, by local conditions. Any
general description is liable to be qualified by numerous exceptions.
Beneath the whole mediæval system lay the idea that the land was the only
economic basis of wealth. During the earlier Middle Ages this was largely
true everywhere, and was specially so in Germany. Each little district
produced almost all that it needed for its own wants; and the economic
value of the town consisted in its being a corporation of artisans
exchanging the fruits of their industries for the surplus of farm produce
which the peasants brought to their market-place. But the increasing trade
of the towns, developed at first along the greater rivers, the arteries of
the countries, gradually produced another source of wealth; and this
commerce made great strides after the Crusades had opened the Eastern
markets to European traders. Trade, commerce, and manufactures were the
life of the towns, and were rapidly increasing their importance.
In mediæval times each town was an independent economic centre, and the
regulation of industry and of trade was an exclusively municipal affair.
This state of matters had changed in some countries before the time of the
Reformation, and statesmen had begun to recognise the importance of a
national trade, and to take steps to further it; but in Germany, chiefly
owing to its hopeless divisions, the old state of matters remained, and
the municipalities continued to direct and control all commercial and
industrial affairs.
The towns had originally grown up under the protection of the Emperor, or
of some great lord of the soil, or of an ecclesiastical prince or
foundation, and the early officials were the representatives of these
fostering powers. The descendants of this early official class became
known as the “patricians” of the city, and they regarded all the official
positions as the hereditary privileges of their class. The town population
was thoroughly organised in associations of workmen, commonly called
“gilds,” which at first concerned themselves simply with the regulation
and improvement of the industry carried on, and with the education and
recreations of the workers. But these “gilds” soon assumed a political
character. The workmen belonging to them formed the fighting force needed
for the independence and protection of the city. Each “gild” had its
fighting organisation, its war banner, its armoury; and its members were
trained to the use of arms, and practised it in their hours of recreation.
The “gilds” therefore began to claim some share in the government of the
town, and in most German cities, in the decades before the Reformation,
the old aristocratic government of the “patricians” had given place to the
more democratic rule of the “gilds.” The chief offices connected with the
“gilds” insensibly tended to become hereditary in a few leading families,
and this created a second “patriciat,” whose control was resented by the
great mass of the workmen. Nürnberg was one of the few great German cities
where the old “patricians” continued to rule down to the times of the
Reformation.
These “gilds” were for the most part full of business energy, which showed
itself in the twofold way of making such regulations as they believed
would insure good workmanship, and of securing facilities for the sale of
their wares. All the workmen, it was believed, were interested in the
production of good articles, and the bad workmanship of one artisan was
regarded as bringing discredit upon all. Hence, as a rule, every article
was tested in private before it was exposed for public sale, and various
punishments were devised to check the production of inferior goods. Thus
in Bremen every badly made pair of shoes was publicly destroyed at the
pillory of the town. Such regulations belonged to the private
administration of the towns, and differed in different places. Indeed, the
whole municipal government of the German cities presents an endless
variety, due to the local history and other conditions affecting the
individual towns. While the production was a matter for private regulation
in each centre of industry, distribution involved the towns in something
like a common policy. It demanded safe means of communication between one
town and another, between the towns and the rural districts, and safe
outlets to foreign lands. It needed roads, bridges, and security of
travel. The towns banded themselves together, and made alliances with
powerful feudal nobles to secure these advantages. Such was the origin of
the great Hanseatic League, which had its beginnings in Flanders, spread
over North Germany, included the Scandinavian countries, and grew to be a
European power.(48) The less known leagues among the cities of South
Germany did equally good service, and they commonly secured outlets to
Venice, Florence, and Genoa, by alliances with the peasantry in whose
hands were the chief passes of the Alps. All this meant an opposition
between the burghers and the nobles—an opposition which was continuous,
which on occasion flamed out into great wars, and which compelled the
cities to maintain civic armies, composed partly of their citizens and
partly of hired troops. It was reckoned that Strassburg and Augsburg
together could send a fighting force of 40,000 men into the field.
The area of trade, though, according to modern ideas, restricted, was
fairly extensive. It included all the countries in modern Europe and the
adjacent seas. The sea-trade was carried on in the Mediterranean and Black
Seas, in the Baltic and North Seas, and down the western coasts of France
and Spain. The North Sea was the great fishing ground, and large
quantities of dried fish, necessary for the due keeping of Lent, were
despatched in coasting vessels, and by the overland routes to the southern
countries of Europe. Furs, skins, and corn came from Russia and the
northern countries. Spain, some parts of Germany, and above all England,
were the wool-exporting countries. The eastern counties of England, many
towns in Germany and France, and especially the Low Countries, were the
centres of the woollen manufactures. The north of France was the great
flax-growing country. In Italy, at Barcelona in Spain, and at Lyons in
France, silk was produced and manufactured. The spices and dried fruits of
the East, and its silks and costly brocades and feathers, came from the
Levant to Venice, and were carried north through the great passes which
pierce the range of the Alps.
Civic statesmen did their best, by mutual bargains and the establishment
of factories, to protect and extend trading facilities for their townsmen.
The German merchant had his magnificent _Fondaco dei Tedeschi_ in Venice,
his factories of the Hanseatic League in London, Bruges, Bergen, and even
in far-off Novgorod; and Englishmen had also their factories in foreign
parts, within which they could buy and sell in peace.
The perils of the German merchant, in spite of all civic leagues, were at
home rather than abroad. His country swarmed with Free Nobles, each of
whom looked upon himself as a sovereign power, with full right to do as he
pleased within his own dominions, whether these were an extensive
principality or a few hundred acres surrounding his castle. He could
impose what tolls or customs dues he pleased on the merchants whose
heavily-laden waggons entered his territories. He had customary rights
which made bad roads and the lack of bridges advantages to the lord of the
soil. If an axle or wheel broke, if a waggon upset in crossing a dangerous
ford, the bales thrown on the path or stranded on the banks of the stream
could be claimed by the proprietor of the land. Worse than all were the
perils from the robber-knights—men who insisted on their right to make
private war even when that took the form of highway robbery, and who
largely subsisted on the gains which came, as they said, from making their
“horses bite off the purses of travellers.”
In spite of all these hindrances, a capitalist class gradually arose in
Germany. Large profits, altogether apart from trade, could be made by
managing, collecting, and forwarding the money coming from the universal
system of Indulgences. It was in this way that the Fuggers of Augsburg
first rose to wealth. Money soon bred money. During the greater part of
the Middle Ages there was no such thing as lending out money on interest,
save among the Italian merchants of North Italy or among the Jews. The
Church had always prohibited what it called usury. But Churchmen were the
first to practise the sin they had condemned. The members of
ecclesiastical corporations began to make useful advances, charging an
interest of from 7 to 12 per cent.—moderate enough for the times.
Gradually the custom spread among the wealthy laity, who did not confine
themselves to these reasonable profits, and we find Sebastian Brand
inveighing against the “Christian Jews,” who had become worse oppressors
than the Israelite capitalists whom they copied.
But the great alteration in social conditions, following change in the
distribution of wealth, came when the age of geographical discovery had
made a world commerce a possible thing.
§ 2. Geographical Discoveries and the beginning of a World Trade.
The fifteenth century from its beginning had seen one geographical
discovery after another. Perhaps we may say that the sailors of Genoa had
begun the new era by reaching the Azores and Madeira. Then Dom Henrique of
Portugal, Governor of Ceuta, organised voyages of trade and discovery down
the coast of Africa. Portuguese, Venetian, and Genoese captains commanded
his vessels. From 1426, expedition after expedition was sent forth, and at
his death in 1460 the coast of Africa as far as Guinea had been explored.
His work was carried on by his countrymen. The Guinea trade in slaves,
gold, and ivory was established as early as 1480; the Congo was reached in
1484; and Portuguese ships, under Bartholomew Diaz, rounded the Cape of
Good Hope in 1486. During these later years a new motive had prompted the
voyages of exploration. The growth of the Turkish power in the east of
Europe had destroyed the commercial colonies and factories on the Black
Sea; the fall of Constantinople had blocked the route along the valley of
the Danube; and Venice had a monopoly of the trade with Egypt and Syria,
the only remaining channels by which the merchandise from the East reached
Europe. The great commercial problem of the times was how to get some hold
of the direct trade with the East. It was this that inspired Bristol
skippers, familiar with Iceland, with the idea that by following old Norse
traditions they might find a path by way of the North Atlantic; that sent
Columbus across the Mid-Atlantic to discover the Bahamas and the continent
of America; and that drove the more fortunate Portuguese round the Cape of
Good Hope. Young Vasco da Gama reached the goal first, when, after
doubling the Cape, he sailed up the eastern coast of Africa, reached
Mombasa, and then boldly crossed the Indian Ocean to Calicut, the Indian
emporium for that rich trade which all the European nations were anxious
to share. The possibilities of a world commerce led to the creation of
trading companies; for a larger capital was needed than individual
merchants possessed, and the formation of these companies overshadowed,
discredited, and finally destroyed the gild system of the mediæval trading
cities. Trade and industry became capitalised to a degree previously
unknown. One great family of capitalists, the Welser, had factories in
Rome, Milan, Genoa, and Lyons, and tapped the rich Eastern trade by their
houses in Antwerp, Lisbon, and Madeira. They even tried, unsuccessfully,
to establish a German colony on the new continent—in Venezuela. Another,
the Fuggers of Augsburg, were interested in all kinds of trade, but
especially in the mining industry. It is said that the mines of Thuringia,
Carinthia, and the Tyrol within Germany, and those of Hungary and Spain
outside it, were almost all in their hands. The capital of the family was
estimated in 1546 at sixty-three millions of gulden. This increase of
wealth does not seem to have been confined to a few favourites of fortune.
It belonged to the mass of the members of the great trading companies. Von
Bezold instances a “certain native of Augsburg” whose investment of 500
gulden in a merchant company brought him in seven years 24,500 gulden.
Merchant princes confronted the princes of the State and those of the
Church, and their presence and power dislocated the old social relations.
The towns, the abodes of these rich merchants, acquired a new and powerful
influence among the complex of national relations, until it is not too
much to say, that if the political future of Germany was in the hands of
the secular princes, its social condition came to be dominated by the
burgher class.
§ 3. Increase in Wealth and luxurious Living.
Culture, which had long abandoned the cloisters, came to settle in the
towns. We have already seen that they were the centres of German Humanism
and of the New Learning. The artists of the German Renaissance belonged to
the towns, and their principal patrons were the wealthy burghers. The rich
merchants displayed their civic patriotism in aiding to build great
churches; in erecting magnificent chambers of commerce, where merchandise
could be stored, with halls for buying and selling, and rooms where the
merchants of the town could consult about the interests of the civic
trade; in building _Artushöfe_ or assembly rooms, where the patrician
burghers had their public dances, dinners, and other kinds of social
entertainments; in raising great towers for the honour of the town. They
built magnificent private houses. Æneas Sylvius tells us that in Nürnberg
he saw many burgher houses that befitted kings, and that the King of
Scotland was not as nobly housed as a Nürnberg burgher of the second rank.
They filled these dwellings with gold and silver plate, and with costly
Venetian glass; their furniture was adorned with delicate wood-carving;
costly tapestries, paintings, and engravings decorated the walls; and the
reception-room or _stube_ was the place of greatest display. The towns in
which all this wealth was accumulated were neither populous nor powerful.
They cannot be compared with the city republics of Italy, where the town
ruled over a large territory: the lands belonging to the imperial cities
of Germany were comparatively of small extent. Nor could they boast of the
population of the great cities of the Netherlands. Nürnberg, it is said,
had a population of a little over 20,000 in the middle of the fifteenth
century. Strassburg, a somewhat smaller one. The population of
Frankfurt-on-the-Main was about 10,000 in 1440.(49) The number of
inhabitants had probably increased by one-half more in the decades
immediately preceding the Reformation. But all the great towns, with their
elaborate fortifications, handsome buildings, and massive towers, had a
very imposing appearance in the beginning of the sixteenth century.
There was, however, another side to all this. There was very little
personal “comfort” and very little personal refinement among the rich
burghers and nobles of Germany—much less than among the corresponding
classes in Italy, the Netherlands, and France. The towns were badly
drained, if drained at all; the streets were seldom paved, and mud and
filth accumulated in almost indescribable ways; the garbage was thrown out
of the windows; and troops of swine were the ordinary scavengers. The
increase of wealth showed itself chiefly in all kinds of sensual living.
Preachers, economists, and satirists denounce the luxury and immodesty of
the dress both of men and women, the gluttony and the drinking habits of
the rich burghers and of the nobility of Germany. We learn from Hans von
Schweinichen that noblemen prided themselves on having men among their
retainers who could drink all rivals beneath the table, and that noble
personages seldom met without such a drinking contest.(50) The wealthy,
learned, and artistic city of Nürnberg possessed a public waggon, which
every night was led through the streets to pick up and convey to their
homes drunken burghers found lying in the filth of the streets. The
_Chronicle of the Zimmer Family_ relates that at the castle of Count
Andrew of Sonnenberg, at the conclusion of a carnival dance and after the
usual “sleeping drink” had been served round, one of the company went to
the kennels and carried to the ball-room buckets of scraps and slops
gathered to feed the hounds, and that the lords and ladies amused
themselves by flinging the contents at each other, “to the great
detriment,” the chronicler adds, “of their clothes and of the room.”(51) A
like licence pervaded the relations between men and women, of which it
will perhaps suffice to say that the public baths, where, be it noted, the
bathing was often promiscuous, were such that they served Albert Dürer and
other contemporary painters the purpose of a “life school” to make
drawings of the nude.(52) The conversation and behaviour of the nobles and
wealthy burghers of Germany in the decades before the Reformation
displayed a coarseness which would now be held to disgrace the lowest
classes of the population in any country.(53)
The gradual capitalising of industry had been sapping the old “gild”
organisation within the cities; the extension of commerce, and especially
the shifting of the centre of external trade from Venice to Antwerp, in
consequence of the discovery of the new route to the Eastern markets, and
above all, the growth of the great merchant companies, whose world-trade
required enormous capital, overshadowed the “gilds” and destroyed their
influence. The rise and power of this capitalist order severed the poor
from the rich, and created, in a sense unknown before, a proletariat class
within the cities, which was liable to be swollen by the influx of
discontented and ruined peasants from the country districts. The
corruption of morals, which reached its height in the city life of the
first quarter of the sixteenth century, intensified the growing hatred
between the rich burgher and the poor workman. The ostentatious display of
burgher wealth heightened the natural antipathy between merchant and
noble. The universal hatred of the merchant class is a pronounced feature
of the times. “They increase prices, make hunger, and slay the poor folk,”
was a common saying. Men like Ulrich von Hutten were prepared to justify
the robber-knights because they attacked the merchants, who, he said, were
ruining Germany. Yet the merchant class increased and flourished, and with
them, the towns which they inhabited.
§ 4. The Condition of the Peasantry.
The condition of the peasantry in Germany has also to be described. The
folk who practise husbandry usually form the most stable element in any
community, but they could not avoid being touched by the economic
movements of the time. The seeds of revolution had long been sown among
the German peasantry, and peasant risings had taken place in different
districts of south-central Europe from the middle of the fourteenth down
to the opening years of the sixteenth centuries. It is difficult to
describe accurately the state of these German peasants. The social
condition of the nobles and the burghers has had many an historian, and
their modes of life have left abundant traces in literature and
archæology; but peasant houses and implements soon perished, and the
chronicles seldom refer to the world to which the “land-folk” belonged,
save when some local peasant rising or the tragedy of the Peasants’ War
thrust them into history. Our main difficulty, however, does not arise so
much from lack of descriptive material—for that can be found when
diligently sought for—as from the varying, almost contradictory statements
that are made. Some contemporary writers condescend to describe the
peasant class. A large number of collections of _Weisthümer_, the
consuetudinary laws which regulated the life of the village communities,
have been recovered and carefully edited;(54) folk-songs preserve the old
life and usages; many of the _Fastnachtspiele_ or rude carnival dramas
deal with peasant scenes; and Albert Dürer and other artists of the times
have sketched over and over again the peasant, his house and cot-yard, his
village and his daily life. We can, in part, reconstruct the old peasant
life and its surroundings. Only it must be remembered that the life varied
not only in different parts of Germany, but in the same districts and
decades under different rural proprietors; for the peasant was so
dependent on his over-lord that the character of the proprietor counted
for much in the condition of the people.
The village artisan did not exist. The peasants lived by themselves apart
from all other classes of the population. That is the universal statement.
They carried the produce of their land and their live-stock to the nearest
town, sold it in the market-place, and bought there what they needed for
their life and work.
They dwelt in villages fortified after a fashion; for the group of houses
was surrounded sometimes by a wall, but usually by a stout fence, made
with strong stakes and interleaved branches. This was entered by a gate
that could be locked. Outside the fence, circling the whole was a deep
ditch crossed by a “falling door” or drawbridge. Within the fence among
the houses there was usually a small church, a public-house, a house or
room (_Spielhaus_) where the village council met and where justice was
dispensed. In front stood a strong wooden stake, to which criminals were
tied for punishment, and near it always the stocks, sometimes a gallows,
and more rarely the pole and wheel for the barbarous mediæval punishment
“breaking on the wheel.”
The houses were wooden frames filled in with sun-dried bricks, and were
thatched with straw; the chimneys were of wood protected with clay. The
cattle, fuel, fodder, and family were sheltered under the one large roof.
The timber for building and repairs was got from the forest under
regulations set down in the _Weisthümer_, and the peasants had leave to
collect the fallen branches for firewood, the women gathering and
carrying, and the men cutting and stacking under the eaves. All breaches
of the forest laws were severely punished (in some of the _Weisthümer_ the
felling of a tree without leave was punished by beheading); so was the
moving of landmarks; for wood and soil were precious.
Most houses had a small fenced garden attached, in which were grown
cabbages, greens, and lettuce; small onions (cibölle, _Scotticé_ syboes),
parsley, and peas; poppies, garlic, and hemp; apples, plums, and, in South
Germany, grapes; as well as other things whose mediæval German names are
not translatable by me. Wooden beehives were placed in the garden, and a
pigeon-house usually stood in the yard.
The scanty underclothing of the peasants was of wool and the outer dress
of linen—the men’s, girt with a belt from which hung a sword, for they
always went armed. Their furniture consisted of a table, several
three-legged stools, and one or two chests. Rude cooking utensils hung on
the walls, and dried pork, fruits, and baskets of grain on the rafters.
The drinking-cups were of coarse clay; and we find regulations that the
table-cloth or covering ought to be washed at least once a year! Their
ordinary food was “some poor bread, oatmeal porridge, and cooked
vegetables; and their drink, water and whey.” The live-stock included
horses, cows, goats, sheep, pigs, and hens.(55)
The villagers elected from among themselves four men, the _Bauernmeister_,
who were the Fathers of the community. They were the arbiters in disputes,
settled quarrels, and arranged for an equitable distribution of the
various feudal assessments and services. They had no judicial or
administrative powers; these belonged to the over-lord, or a
representative appointed by him. This official sat in the justice room,
heard cases, issued sentences, and exercised all the mediæval powers of
“pit and gallows.” The whole list of mediæval punishments, ludicrous and
gruesome, were at his command. It was he who ordered the scolding wife to
be carried round the church three times while her neighbours jeered; who
set the unfortunate charcoal-burner, who had transgressed some forest law,
into the stocks, with his bare feet exposed to a slow fire till his soles
were thoroughly burnt; who beheaded men who cut down trees, and ordered
murderers to be broken on the wheel. He saw that the rents, paid in kind,
were duly gathered. He directed the forced services of ploughing, sowing,
and harvesting the over-lord’s fields, what wood was to be hewn for the
castle, what ditches dug, and what roads repaired. He saw that the
peasants drank no wine but what came from the proprietor’s vineyards, and
that they drank it in sufficient quantity; that they ground their grain at
the proprietor’s mill, and fired their bread at the estate bakehouse. He
exacted the two most valuable of the moveable goods of a dead peasant—the
hated “death-tax.” There was no end to his powers. Of course, according to
the _Weisthümer_, these powers were to be exercised in _customary_ ways;
and in some parts of Germany the indefinite “forced services” had been
commuted to twelve days’ service in the year, and in others to the payment
of a fixed rate in lieu of service.
This description of the peasant life has been taken entirely from the
_Weisthümer_, and, for reasons to be seen immediately, it perhaps
represents rather a “golden past” than the actual state of matters at the
beginning of the sixteenth century. It shows the peasants living in a
state of rude plenty, but for the endless exactions of their lords and the
continual robberies to which they were exposed from bands of sturdy rogues
which swarmed through the country, and from companies of soldiers, who
thought nothing of carrying off the peasant’s cows, slaying his swine,
maltreating his womenkind, and even firing his house.
The peasants had their diversions, not always too seemly. On the days of
Church festivals, and they were numerous, the peasantry went to church and
heard Mass in the morning, talked over the village business under the
lime-trees, or in some open space near the village, and spent the
afternoon in such amusements as they liked best—eating and drinking at the
public-house, and dancing on the village green. In one of his least known
poems, Hans Sachs describes the scene—the girls and the pipers waiting at
the dancing-place, and the men and lads in the public-house eating calf’s
head, tripe, liver, black puddings, and roast pork, and drinking whey and
the sour country wine, until some sank under the benches; and there was
such a jostling, scratching, shoving, bawling, and singing, that not a
word could be heard. Then three young men came to the dancing-place, his
sweetheart had a garland ready for one of them, and the dancing began;
other couples joined, and at last sixteen pairs of feet were in motion.
Rough jests, gestures, and caresses went round.
“Nach dem der Messner von Hirschau,
Der tanzet mit des Pfarrhaus Frau
Von Budenheim, die hat er lieb,
Viel Scherzens am Tanz mit ihr trieb.”
The men whirled their partners off their feet and spun them round and
round, or seized them by the waist and tossed them as high as they could;
while they themselves leaped and threw out their feet in such reckless
ways that Hans Sachs thought they would all fall down.
The winter amusements gathered round the spinning house. For it was the
custom in most German villages for the young women to resort to a large
room in the mill, or to the village tavern, or to a neighbour’s house,
with their wool and flax, their distaffs and spindles, some of them old
heirlooms and richly ornamented, to spin all evening. The lads came also
to pick the fluff off the lasses’ dresses, they said; to hold the small
beaker of water into which they dipped their fingers as they span; and to
cheer the spinsters with songs and recitations. After work came the
dancing. On festival evenings, and especially at carnival times, the lads
treated their sweethearts to a late supper and a dance; and escorted them
home, carrying their distaffs and spindles.(56) All the old German love
folk-songs are full of allusions to this peasant courtship, and it is not
too much to say that from the singing in the spinning house have come most
of the oldest folk-songs.
These descriptions apply to the German peasants of Central and South
Germany. In the north and north-east, the agricultural population, which
was for the most part of Slavonic descent, had been reduced by their
conquerors to a serfdom which had no parallel in the more favoured
districts.
§ 5. Earlier Social Revolts.
It was among the peasants of German descent that there had been risings,
successful and unsuccessful, for more than a century. The train for
revolution had been laid not where serfdom was at its worst, but where
there was ease enough in life to allow men to think, and where freedom was
nearest in sight. It may be well to refer to the earlier peasant revolts,
before attempting to investigate the causes of that permanent unrest which
was abundantly evident at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
The first great successful peasant rebellion was the fight for freedom
made by the people of the four forest cantons in Switzerland. The weapons
with which they overthrew the chivalry of Europe, rude pikes made by tying
their scythes to their alpenstocks, may still be seen in the historical
museums of Basel and Constance. They proved that man for man the peasant
was as good as the noble. The free peasant soldier had come into being.
These free peasants did not really secede from the Empire till 1499, and
were formally connected with it till 1648. The Emperor was still their
over-lord. But they were his free peasants, able to form leagues for their
mutual defence and for the protection of their rights. Other cantons and
some neighbouring cities joined them, and the Swiss Confederacy, with its
flag, a white cross on a red ground, and its motto, “Each for all and all
for each,” became a new nation in Europe. During the next century
(1424-1471) the peasants of the Rhætian Alps also won their freedom, and
formed a confederacy similar to the Swiss, though separate from it. It was
called the _Graubund_.
The example of these peasant republics, strong in the protection which
their mountains gave them, fired the imagination of the German peasantry
of the south and the south-west of the Empire, and the leaders of lost
popular causes found a refuge in the Alpine valleys while they meditated
on fresh schemes to emancipate their followers. We have evidence of the
popularity of the Swiss in the towns and country districts of Germany all
through the fifteenth and into the sixteenth century.(57)
But while the social tumults and popular uprisings against authority,
which are a feature of the close of the Middle Ages, are usually and
rightly enough called peasant insurrections, the name tends to obscure
their real character. They were rather the revolts of the poor against the
rich, of debtors against creditors, of men who had scanty legal rights or
none at all against those who had the protection of the existing laws, and
they were joined by the poor of the towns as well as by the peasantry of
the country districts. The peasants generally began the revolt and the
townsmen followed; but this was not always the case. Sometimes the mob of
the cities rose first and the peasants joined afterwards. In many cases,
too, the poorer nobles were in secret or open sympathy with the
insurrectionary movement. On more than one occasion they led the
insurgents and fought at their head. The union of poor nobles and peasants
had made the Bohemian revolt successful.
It must also be remembered that from the end of the fourteenth century on
to the beginning of the sixteenth, however varied the cries and watchwords
of the insurgents may be, one persistent note of detestation of the
priests (the _pfaffen_) is always heard; and, from the way in which Jews
and priests are continually linked together in one common denunciation, it
may be inferred that the hatred arose more from the intolerable pressure
of clerical extortion than from any feeling of irreligion. The tithes,
great and small, and the means taken to exact them, were a galling burden.
“The priests,” says an English writer, “have their tenth part of all the
corn, meadows, pasture, grass, wood, colts, lambs, geese, and chickens.
Over and besides the tenth part of every servant’s wages, wool, milk,
honey, wax, cheese, and butter; yea, and they look so narrowly after their
profits that the poor wife must be countable to them for every tenth egg,
or else she getteth not her rights at Easter, and shall be taken as a
heretic.” As matter of fact, many of these tithes, extorted in the name of
the Church, did not go into the pockets of the clergy at all, but were
seized by the feudal superior and went to increase his revenues. Popular
feeling, however, seldom discriminates, and feudal and clerical dues were
regarded as belonging to one system of intolerable oppression. Besides,
the rapacity of Churchmen went far beyond the exaction of the tithes. “I
see,” said a Spaniard, “that we can scarcely get anything from Christ’s
ministers but for money; at baptism money, at bishoping money, at marriage
money, for confession money—no, not extreme unction without money! They
will ring no bells without money, no burial in the church without money;
so that it seemeth that Paradise is shut up from them that have no money.
The rich is buried in the church, the poor in the churchyard. The rich man
may marry with his nearest kin, but the poor not so, albeit he be ready to
die for love of her. The rich may eat flesh in Lent, but the poor may not,
albeit fish perhaps be much dearer. The rich man may readily get large
Indulgences, but the poor none, because he wanteth money to pay for
them.”(58)
In spite of this hatred of the priests, it will be found that almost every
insurrectionary movement was impregnated by some sentiment of enthusiastic
religion, with which was blended some confused dream that the kingdom of
God might be set up on earth, if only the priests were driven out of the
land. This religious element drew some of its strength from the Lollard
movement in England and from the Taborite in Bohemia, but after 1476 it
had a distinctly German character. Its connection with what may almost be
called the epidemic of pilgrimages, the strongly increased veneration for
the Blessed Virgin, and the injunctions laid upon the confederates in some
of the revolutionary movements to repeat so many _Pater Nosters_ and _Ave
Marias_, seem to lead to the conclusion that much of that revival of an
enthusiastic and superstitious religion which marked the last half of the
fifteenth century may be regarded as an attempt to create a popular
religion apart from priests and clergy of all kinds.
One of the earliest of these popular uprisings occurred at Gotha in 1391,
when the peasantry of the neighbourhood and many of the burghers of the
town rose against the exactions of the Jews, and demanded their expulsion.
It was an insurrection of debtors against usurers, and was in the end put
down by the majority of the citizens. From this date onwards to 1470
similar risings took place in many parts of Germany, prompted by the same
or like causes—the exactions of Jews, priests, or nobles. The years
1431-1432 saw a great Hussite propaganda carried on all over Europe.
Countries were flooded with Hussite proclamations, and traversed by
Hussite emissaries. Paul Crawar was sent to Scotland, and others like him
to Spain, to the Netherlands, and to East Prussia. They taught among other
things that the Old Testament law about tithes had no place within the
Christian Church, and that Christian tithes were originally free-will
offerings,—a statement peculiarly acceptable to the German peasantry. All
Germany had learnt by this time how Bohemian peasants, trained and led by
men belonging to the lesser nobility, had routed in two memorable
campaigns the imperial armies led by the Emperor himself, and how they had
begun even to invade Germany. The chroniclers speak of the anxiety of the
governing classes, civic and rural, when they recognised the strength of
the feelings excited by this propaganda. The Hussite doctrine of tithes
appears hereafter in most of the peasant programmes.
A still more powerful impulse to revolts was given by the tragic fate of
Charles the Bold of Burgundy. Charles was the ideal feudal autocrat. He
was looked up to and imitated by the feudal princes of Germany in the
fifteenth as was Louis XIV. by their descendants in the end of the
seventeenth century. The common people regarded him as the typical feudal
tyrant, and the hateful impression which his arrogance, his
vindictiveness, and his oppression of the poor made upon them comes out in
the folk-songs of the period:
“Er schazt sich künig Alexander gleich;
Er wolt bezwingen alle Reich,
Das wante Got in kurzer stund.”
He even came to be considered by them as one of the Antichrists who were
to appear, and for years after his death at Nancy (1477) many believed
that he was alive, expiating his sins on a prolonged pilgrimage.
When this great potentate, who was believed to have boasted that there
were three rulers—God in heaven, Lucifer in hell, and himself on earth—was
defeated at Granson, routed at Morat, routed and slain at Nancy, and that
by Swiss peasants, the exultation was immense, and it was believed that
the peasantry might inherit the earth.(59)
§ 6. The religious Socialism of Hans Böhm.
During the last years of this memorable Burgundian war a strange movement
arose in the very centre of Germany, within the district which may be
roughly defined as the triangle whose points were the towns of
Aschaffenburg, Würzburg, and Crailsheim, in the secluded valleys of the
Spessart and the Taubergrund. A young man, Hans Böhm (Böheim, Böhaim),
belonging to the very lowest class of society, below the peasant, who
wandered from one country festival or church ale to another, and played on
the small drum or on the dudelsack (rude bagpipes), or sang songs for the
dancers, was suddenly awakened to a sense of spiritual things by the
discourse of a wandering Franciscan. He was utterly uneducated. He did not
even know the Creed. He had visions of the Blessed Virgin, who appeared to
him in the guise of a lady dressed in white, called him to be a preacher,
and promised him further revelations, which he received from time to time.
His home was the village of Helmstadt in the Tauber valley; and the most
sacred spot he knew was a chapel dedicated to the Virgin at the small
village of Niklashausen on the Tauber. The chapel had been granted an
indulgence, and was the scene of small pilgrimages. Hans Böhm appeared
suddenly on the Sunday in Mid-Lent (March 24th, 1476), solemnly burnt his
rude drum and bagpipes before the crowd of people, and declared that he
had hitherto ministered to the sins and vanities of the villagers, but
that henceforth he was going to be a preacher of grace. He had been a lad
of blameless life, and his character gave force to his words. He related
his visions, and the people believed him. It was a period when an epidemic
of pilgrimage was sweeping over Europe, and the pilgrims spread the news
of the prophet far and wide. Crowds came to hear him from the neighbouring
valleys. His fame spread to more distant parts, and chroniclers declare
that on some days he preached to audiences of from twenty to thirty
thousand persons. His pulpit was a barrel set on end, or the window of a
farmhouse, or the branch of a tree. He assured his hearers that the
holiest spot on earth, holier by far than Rome, was the chapel of Our Lady
at Niklashausen, and that true religion consisted in doing honour to the
Blessed Virgin. He denounced all priests in unmeasured terms: they were
worse than Jews; they might be converted for a while, but as soon as they
went back among their fellows they were sure to become backsliders. He
railed against the Emperor: he was a miscreant, who supported the whole
vile crew of princes, over-lords, tax-gatherers, and other oppressors of
the poor. He scoffed at the Pope. He denied the existence of Purgatory:
good men went directly to heaven and bad men went to hell. The day was
coming, he declared, when every prince, even the Emperor himself, must
work for his day’s wages like all poor people. He asserted that taxes of
all kinds were evil, and should not be paid; that fish, game, and meadow
lands were common property; that all men were brethren, and should share
alike. When his sermon was finished the crowd of devotees knelt round the
“holy youth,” and he, blessing them, pardoned their sins in God’s name.
Then the crowd surged round him, tearing at his clothes to get some scrap
of cloth to take home and worship as a relic; and the Niklashausen chapel
became rich with the offerings of the thousands of pilgrims.
The authorities, lay and clerical, paid little attention to him at first.
Some princes and some cities (Nürnberg, for example) prohibited their
subjects from going to Niklashausen; but the prophet was left untouched.
He came to believe that his words ought to be translated into actions. One
Sunday he asked his followers to meet him on the next Sunday, bringing
their swords and leaving their wives and children at home. The Bishop of
Würzburg, hearing this, sent a troop of thirty-four horsemen, who seized
the prophet, flung him on a horse, and carried him away to the bishop’s
fortress of Frauenberg near Würzburg. His followers had permitted his
capture, and seemed dazed by it. In a day or two they recovered their
courage, and, exhorted by an old peasant who had received a vision, and
headed by four Franconian knights, they marched against Frauenberg and
surrounded it. They expected its walls to fall like those of Jericho; and
when they were disappointed they lingered for some days, and then
gradually dispersed. Hans himself, after examination, was condemned to be
burnt as a heretic. He died singing a folk-hymn in praise of the Blessed
Virgin.
His death did not end the faith of his followers. In spite of severe
prohibitions, the pilgrimages went on and the gifts accumulated. A
neighbouring knight sacked the chapel and carried away the treasure, which
he was forced to share with his neighbours. Still the pilgrimages
continued, until at last the ecclesiastical authorities removed the priest
and tore down the building, hoping thereby to destroy the movement.
The memory of Hans Böhm lived among the common people, peasants and
artisans; for the lower classes of Würzburg and the neighbouring towns had
been followers of the movement. A religious social movement, purely
German, had come into being, and was not destined to die soon. The effects
of Hans Böhm’s teaching appear in almost all subsequent peasant and
artisan revolts.(60) Even Sebastian Brand takes the Niklashausen pilgrims
as his type of those enthusiasts who are not contented with the
revelations of the Old and New Testaments, but must seek a special prophet
of their own:
“Man weis doch aus der Schrift so viel,
Aus altem und aus neuem Bunde,
Es braucht nicht wieder neuer Kunde.
Dennoch wallfahrten sie zur Klausen
Des Sackpfeifers von Nicklashausen.”(61)
And the Niklashausen pilgrimage was preserved in the memories of the
people by a lengthy folk-song which Liliencron has printed in his
collection.(62)
From this time onwards there was always some tinge of religious enthusiasm
in the social revolts, where peasant and poor burghers stood shoulder to
shoulder against the ruling powers in country and in town.
The peasants within the lands of the Abbot of Kempten, north-east of the
Lake of Constance, had for two generations protested against the way in
which the authorities were treating them (1420-1490). They rose in open
revolt in 1491-1492. It was a purely agrarian rising to begin with, caused
by demands made on them by their over-lord not sanctioned by the old
customs expressed in the _Weisthümer_; but the lower classes of the town
of Kempten made common cause with the insurgents. Yet there are distinct
traces of impregnation with religious enthusiasm not unlike that which
inspired the Hans Böhm movement. The rising was crushed, and the leaders
who escaped took refuge in Switzerland.
§ 7. Bundschuh Revolts.
In the widespread social revolt which broke out in Elsass in 1493, the
peasants were supported by the towns; demands were made for the abolition
of the imperial and the ecclesiastical courts of justice, for the
reduction of ecclesiastical property, for the plundering of Jews who had
been fattening upon usury, and for the curbing of the power of the
priests. The Germans had a proverb, “The poor man must tie his shoes with
string,” and the “tied shoe” (_Bundschuh_), the poor man’s shoe, became
the emblem of this and subsequent social revolts, while their motto was,
“Only what is just before God.” This rebellion, which was prematurely
betrayed, did not lack prominent leaders. One of them was Hans Ulman, the
burgomeister of Schlettstadt, who died on the scaffold affirming the
justice of the demands which he and his companions had made, and
predicting their future triumph.
In 1501 the peasants of Kempten and the neighbouring districts again rose
in rebellion, and were again joined by the poorer townspeople. In the year
following, 1502, a revolt was planned having for its headquarters the
village of Untergrombach, near Speyer; it spread into Elsass, along the
Neckar and down the Rhine. The _Bundschuh_ banner was again unfurled. It
was made of blue silk, with a white cross, the emblem of Switzerland, in
the centre. It was adorned with a picture of the crucified Christ, a
_Bundschuh_ on the one side, and a kneeling peasant on the other. The
motto was again, “Only what is just before God.” Every associate promised
to repeat five times a day the Lord’s Prayer and the _Ave Maria_. The
patron saints were declared to be the Blessed Virgin and St. John. The
movement was strongly anti-clerical. The leaders taught that there could
be no deliverance from oppression until the priests were driven from the
land, and until the property of the nobles and the priests was confiscated
and their power broken. Tithes, feudal exactions of all kinds, and all
social inequalities were denounced; water, forest and pasture lands were
declared to be the common property of all. The leaders recognised the rule
of the Emperor as over-lord, but denounced all intermediate jurisdictions.
The plan was to raise the peasants and the townspeople throughout all
Germany, and to call upon the Swiss to aid them in winning their
deliverance from oppression. The revolt was put down with savage cruelty;
most of the leaders were quartered. Many escaped to Switzerland, and lay
hid among the Alpine valleys.
One of these was Joss Fritz, who had been a soldier (_landsknecht_)—a man
with many qualities of leadership. He had tenacity of purpose, great
powers of organisation, and gifts of persuasion. He vowed to restore the
_Bundschuh_ League. He remained years in hiding in Switzerland, maturing
his plans. Then he returned secretly to his own people. He seems to have
secured an appointment as forester to a nobleman whose lands lay near the
town of Freiburg in the Breisgau; and there, in the small village of
Lehen, he began to weave together again the broken threads of the
_Bundschuh_ League. He mingled with the poorer people in the taverns, at
church ales, on the village greens on festival days. He spoke of the
justice of God and the wickedness of the world. He expounded the old
principles of the _Bundschuh_ with some few variations. Indiscriminate
hatred of priests seems to have been abandoned. Most of the village
priests were peasants, and suffered, like them, from overbearing
superiors. The parish priest of Lehen became a strong supporter of the
_Bundschuh_, and told his parishioners that all its ideas could be proved
from the word of God. Joss Fritz won over to his side the “gilds” of
beggars, strolling musicians, all kinds of vagrants who could be useful.
They carried his messages, summoned the people to his meetings in quiet
spaces in the woods, and were active assistants. At these meetings Joss
Fritz and his lieutenant Jerome, a journeyman baker, expounded the
Scriptures “under the guidance of the Holy Spirit simply,” and proved all
the demands of the _Bundschuh_ from the word of God.
When the country seemed almost ripe for the rising, Joss Fritz resolved to
prepare the banner as secretly as possible. It was easy to get the blue
silk and sew the white cross on its ground; the difficulty was to find an
artist sympathetic enough to paint the emblems, and courageous enough to
keep the secret. The banner was at last painted. The crucified Christ in
the centre, a peasant kneeling in prayer on the one side and the
_Bundschuh_ on the other, the figures of the Virgin Mary and St. John, and
the pictures of the Pope and the Emperor. The motto, “O Lord, help the
righteous,” was added, and the banner with its striking symbolism was
complete. The League had the old programme with some alterations:—no
masters but God, the Pope, and the Emperor, no usury, all debts to be
cancelled, and the clauses mentioned above. The leaders boasted that their
league extended as far as the city of Köln (Cologne), and that the Swiss
would march at their head. But the secret leaked out before the date
planned for the general rising; and the revolt was mercilessly stamped out
(1512-1513). Its leader escaped with the _Bundschuh_ banner wound round
his body under his clothes. In four years he was back again at his work
(1517). In a very short time his agents, the “gild” of beggars, wandering
minstrels, poor priests, pilgrims to local shrines, pardon-sellers,
begging friars, and even lepers, had leagued the peasantry and the poorer
artisans in the towns in one vast conspiracy which permeated the entire
district between the Vosges and the Black Forest, including the whole of
Baden and Elsass. The plot was again betrayed before the plans of the
leaders were matured, and the partial risings were easily put down; but
when the authorities set themselves to make careful investigations, they
were aghast at the extent of the movement. The peasants of the country
districts and the populace of the towns had been bound together to avenge
common wrongs. The means of secret communication had been furnished by
country innkeepers, old _landsknechts_, pedlars, parish priests, as well
as by the vagrants above mentioned; and the names of some of the
subordinate leaders—“long” John, “crooked” Peter, “old” Kuntz—show the
classes from which they were drawn. It was discovered that the populace of
Weisenburg had come to an agreement with the people of Hagenau (both towns
were in Elsass) to slay the civic councillors and judges and all the
inhabitants of noble descent, to refuse payment of all imperial and
ecclesiastical dues, and that the Swiss had promised to come to their
assistance.
One might almost say that between the years 1503 and 1517 the social
revolution was permanently established in the southern districts of the
Empire, from Elsass in the west to Carinthia and the Steiermarck in the
east. It is needless to describe the risings in detail. They were not
purely peasant rebellions, for the townspeople were almost always
involved; but they all displayed that mingling of communist ideas and
religious enthusiasm of which the _Bundschuh_ banner had become the
emblem, and which may be traced back to the movement under Hans Böhm as
its German source, and perhaps to the earlier propaganda of the Hussite
revolutionaries or Taborites. The later decades of the fifteenth and the
earlier years of the sixteenth century were a time of permanent social
unrest.
§ 8. The Causes of the continuous Revolts.
If we ask why it was that the peasants, whose lot, according to the
information given in the _Weisthümer_, could not have been such a very
hard one, were so ready to rise in rebellion during the last quarter of
the fifteenth century, the answer seems to be that there must have been a
growing change in their circumstances. Some chroniclers have described the
condition of the peasants in the end of the fifteenth and in the beginning
of the sixteenth century, and they always dwell upon their misery. John
Böhm, who wrote in the beginning of the sixteenth century, says that
“their lot was hard and pitiable,” and calls them “slaves.”(63) Sebastian
Frank (1534), Sebastian Munster (1546), H. Pantaleone (1570), an Italian
who wrote a description of Germany, all agree with Böhm. Frank adds that
the peasants hate every kind of cleric, good or bad, and that their speech
is full of gibes against priests and monks; while Pantaleone observes that
many skilled workmen, artisans, artists, and men of learning have sprung
from this despised peasant class. There must have been a great change for
the worse in the condition of the poorer dwellers both in town and in
country.
So far as the townsmen are concerned, nothing need be added to what has
already been said; but the causes of the growing depression of the
peasantry were more complicated. The universal testimony of contemporaries
is that the gradual introduction of Roman law brought the greatest change,
by placing a means of universal oppression in the hands of the over-lords.
There is no need to suppose that the lawyers who introduced the new
jurisprudence meant to use it to degrade and oppress the peasant class. A
slight study of the _Weisthümer_ shows how complicated and varied was this
consuetudinary law which regulated the relations between peasant and
over-lord. It was natural, when great estates grew to be principalities,
whether lay or clerical, that the over-lords should seek for some
principle of codification or reduction to uniformity. It had been the
custom for centuries to attempt to simplify the ruder and involved German
codes by bringing them into harmony with the principles of Roman law, and
this idea had received a powerful impetus from the Renaissance movement.
But when the bewildering multiplicity of customary usages which had
governed the relations of cultivators to over-lords was simplified
according to the ideas of Roman law, the result was in the highest degree
dangerous to the free peasantry of Germany. The conception of strict
individual proprietorship tended to displace the indefinite conception of
communal proprietorship, and the peasants could only appear in the guise
of tenants on long leases, or serfs who might have some personal rights
but no rights of property, or slaves who had no rights at all. The new
jurisprudence began by attacking the common lands, pastures, and forests.
The passion for the chase, which became the more engrossing as the right
to wage private war grew more and more dangerous, led to the nobles
insisting on the individual title to all forest lands, and to the
publication of such forest laws as we find made in Würtemberg, where
anyone found trespassing with gun or cross-bow was liable to lose one eye.
The attempt to reduce a free peasantry in possession of communal property
to tenants on long lease, then to serfs, and, lastly, to slaves, may be
seen in the seventy years’ struggle between the Abbots of Kempten and
their peasants. These spiritual lords carried on the contest with every
kind of force and chicanery they could command. They enlarged illegally
the jurisdiction of their spiritual courts; they prevented the poor people
who opposed them from coming to the Lord’s Table; they actually falsified
their title-deeds, inserting provisions which were not originally
contained in them.
The case of the Kempten lands was, no doubt, an extreme one, though it
could be matched by others. But the point to be noticed is the immense
opportunities for oppression which were placed in the hands of the
over-lords by the new jurisprudence, and the temptation to make use of
them when their interests seemed to require it, or when their peasantry
began to grow refractory or became too prosperous. The economic changes
which were at work throughout the fifteenth century gave occasion for the
use of the powers which the new jurisdiction had placed at the disposal of
landlords. The economic revolution from the first impoverished the nobles
of Germany; while, in its beginnings and until after the great rise in
prices, it rather helped the peasantry. They had a better market for their
produce, and they so profited by it that the burghers spoke of denying
them the right of free markets, on the ground that they had begun to usurp
the place of the merchants and were trafficking in gold by lending money
on interest. The competition in luxurious dress and living, which the
impoverished nobles carried on with the rich burghers, made the former
still poorer and more reckless. We read of a noble lady in Swabia who,
rather than be outshone at a tournament, sold a village and all her rights
over it in order to buy a blue velvet dress. The nobles, becoming poorer
and poorer, saw their own peasants making money to such an extent that
they were, comparatively speaking, much better off than themselves, so
that in Westphalia it was said that a peasant could get credit more easily
than five nobles.
Moreover, the peasants did not appear to be as submissive to their lords
as they once had been. Nor was it to be wondered at. The creation of the
_landsknechts_ had put new thoughts into their heads. The days of the old
fighting chivalry were over, and the strength of armies was measured by
the number and discipline of the infantry. The victories of the Swiss over
Charles the Bold had made the peasant or artisan soldier a power. Kings
and princes raised standing armies, recruited from the country districts
or from among the wilder and more restless of the town population. The
folk-songs are full of the doings of these plebeian soldiers. When the
_landsknecht_ visited his relations in village or in town, swaggered about
in his gorgeous parti-coloured clothes, his broad hat adorned with huge
feathers, his great gauntlets and his weapons; when he showed a gold chain
or his ducats, or a jewel he had won as his share of the booty; when his
old neighbours saw his dress and gait imitated by the young burghers,—he
became a centre of admiration, and his relations began to hold themselves
high on his account. They acquired a new independence of character, a new
impatience against all that prevented them from rising in the world. It
has scarcely been sufficiently noted how most of the leaders in the
plebeian risings were disbanded _landsknechts_.(64)
The new jurisprudence was a very effectual instrument in the hands of an
impoverished landlord class to ease the peasant of his superfluous wealth,
and to keep him in his proper place. It was used almost universally, and
the peasant rebellions were the natural consequences. But the more
determined peasant revolts, which began with the _Bundschuh_ League, arose
at a time when life was hard for peasant and artisan alike.
The last decade of the fifteenth century and the first of the sixteenth
contained a number of years in which the harvest failed almost entirely
over all or in parts of Germany. They began with 1490, and in that year
contemporary writers, like Trithemius, declare that the lot of the poor
was almost unbearable. The bad harvests of 1491 and 1492 made things
worse. In 1493, the year which saw the foundation of the _Bundschuh_, the
state of matters may be guessed from the fact that men came all the way
from the Tyrol to the upper reaches of the Main, where the harvest was
comparatively good, bought barley there for five times its usual price,
carried it on pack-horses by little frequented paths to their own country,
and sold it at a profit.
In 1499 the Swiss refused to submit to the imperial proposals for
consolidating the Empire. Maximilian or his government in the Tyrol
resolved to punish them, and the Swabian League were to be the
executioners. The Swiss, highly incensed, had declared that if they were
forced into war it would be a war of extermination. They were as bad as
their word. An eye-witness saw whole villages in the wasted districts
forsaken by the men, and the women gathered in troops, feeding on herbs
and roots, and seeing with the apathy of despair their ranks diminish clay
by day.(65) The Swiss war was worse than many bad harvests for the Hegau
and other districts in South Germany.
In 1500 the harvest failed over all Germany; 1501 and 1502 were years when
the crops failed in a number of districts; and in 1503 there was another
universally bad harvest. These years of scarcity pressed most heavily on
the peasant class. In some districts of Brandenburg, peasants were found
in the woods dead of starvation, with the grass which they had been trying
to eat still in their mouths. Cities like Augsburg and Strassburg bought
grain, stored it in magazines, and kept the poor alive by periodical
distributions. This cycle of famine years from 1490 to 1503 was the period
when the most determined and desperate social risings took place, and
largely explains them.(66)
Our description of the social conditions existing during the period which
ushered in the Reformation has been confined to Germany. The great
religious movement took its origin in that land, and it is of the utmost
importance to study the environment there. But the universal economic
changes were producing social disturbances everywhere, modified in
appearance and character by the special conditions of the various
countries of Europe. The popular risings in England, which began with the
gigantic labour strike under Wat Tyler and priest Ball, and ended with the
disturbances during the reign of Edward VI., were the counterpart of the
social revolt in Germany.
From all that has been said, it will be evident that on the eve of the
Reformation the condition of Europe, and of Germany in particular, was one
of seething discontent and full of bitter class hatreds,—the trading
companies and the great capitalists against the “gilds,” the poorer
classes against the wealthier, and the nobles against the towns. This
state of things is abundantly reflected in the folk-songs of the period,
which best reveal the intimate feelings of the people. For it was an age
of song everywhere, and especially in Germany. Nobles and knights,
burghers and peasants, _landsknechts_ and Swiss soldiers, priests and
clerks, lawyers and merchants—all expressed the feelings of their class
when they sang; and the folk-songs give us a wonderful picture of the
class hatreds which were rending asunder the old conditions of mediæval
life, and preparing the way for a new world.
This social ferment was increased by a sudden and mysterious rise in
prices, affecting first the articles of foreign produce, to which the
wealthier classes had become greatly addicted, and at last the ordinary
necessaries of life. The cause, it is now believed, was not the debasing
of the coinage, for that affected a narrow circle only; nor was it the
importation of precious metals from America, for that came later; it was
rather the increased output of the mines in Europe. Whatever the cause,
the thing was to contemporaries an irritating mystery, and each class in
society was disposed to blame the others for it. We have thus at the
beginning of the sixteenth century a restless social condition in Germany,
caused in great measure by economic causes which no one understood, but
whose results were painfully manifest in the crowds of sturdy beggars who
thronged the roads—the refuse of all classes in society, from the broken
noble and the disbanded mercenary soldier to the ruined peasant, the
workman out of employment, the begging friar, and the “wandering student.”
It was into this mass of seething discontent that the spark of religious
protest fell—the one thing needed to fire the train and kindle the social
conflagration. This was the society to which Luther spoke, and its
discontent was the sounding-board which made his words reverberate.
Chapter V. Family And Popular Religious Life in the Decades Before the
Reformation.(67)
§ 1. Devotion of Germany to the Roman Church.
The real roots of the spiritual life of Luther and of the other Reformers
ought to be sought for in the family and in the popular religious life of
the times. It is the duty of the historian to discover, if possible, what
religious instruction was given by parents to children in the pious homes
out of which most of the Reformers came, and what religious influences
confronted and surrounded pious lads after they had left the family
circle. Few have cared to prosecute the difficult task; and it is only
within late years that the requisite material has been accumulated. It has
to be sought for in autobiographies, diaries, and private letters; in the
books of popular devotion which the patience of ecclesiastical
archæologists is exhuming and reprinting; in the references to the pious
confraternities of the later Middle Ages, and more especially to the
_Kalands_ among the artisans, which appear in town chronicles, and whose
constitutions are being slowly unearthed by local historical societies; in
the police regulations of towns and country districts which aim at curbing
the power of the clergy, and in the edicts of princes attempting to
enforce some of the recommendations of the Councils of Constance and
Basel; in the more popular hymns of the time, and in the sermons of the
more fervent preachers; in the pilgrim songs and the pilgrim guide-books;
and in a variety of other sources not commonly studied by Church
historians.
On the surface no land seemed more devoted to the mediæval Church and to
the Pope, its head, than did Germany in the half century before the
Reformation. A cultivated Italian, Aleander, papal nuncio at the Diet of
Worms, was astonished at the signs of disaffection he met with in
1520.(68) He had visited Germany frequently, and he was intimately
acquainted with many of the northern Humanists; and his opinion was that
down to 1510 (the date of his last visit) he had never been among a people
so devoted to the Bishop of Rome. No nation had exhibited such signs of
delight at the ending of the Schism and the re-establishment of the “Peace
of the Church.” The Italian Humanists continually express their wonder at
the strength of the religious susceptibilities of the Germans; and the
papal Curia looked upon German devotion as a never-failing source of Roman
revenue. The Germans displayed an almost feverish anxiety to profit by all
the ordinary and extraordinary means of grace. They built innumerable
churches; their towns were full of conventual foundations; they bought
Indulgences, went on pilgrimages, visited shrines, reverenced relics in a
way that no other nation did. The piety of the Germans was proverbial.
The number of churches was enormous for the population. Almost every tiny
village had its chapel, and every town of any size had several churches.
Church building and decoration was a feature of the age. In the town of
Dantzig 8 new churches had been founded or completed during the fifteenth
century. The “holy” city of Köln (Cologne) at the close of the fifteenth
century contained 11 great churches, 19 parish churches, 22 monasteries,
12 hospitals, and 76 convents; more than a thousand Masses were said at
its altars every day. It was exceptionally rich in ecclesiastical
buildings, no doubt; but the smaller town of Brunswick had 15 churches,
over 20 chapels, 5 monasteries, 6 hospitals, and 12 Beguine-houses, and
its great church, dedicated to St. Blasius, had 26 altars served by 60
ecclesiastics. So it was all over Germany.
Besides the large numbers of monks and nuns who peopled the innumerable
monasteries and convents, a large part of the population belonged to some
semi-ecclesiastical association. Many were tertiaries of St. Francis; many
were connected with the Beguines: Köln (Cologne) had 106 Beguine-houses;
Strassburg, over 60, and Basel, over 30.
The churches and chapels, monasteries and religious houses, received all
kinds of offerings from rich and poor alike. In those days of unexampled
burgher prosperity and wealth, the town churches became “museums and
treasure-houses.” The windows were filled with painted glass; weapons,
armour, jewels, pictures, tapestries were stored in the treasuries or
adorned the walls. Ancient inventories have been preserved of some of
these ecclesiastical accumulations of wealth. In the cathedral church in
Bern, to take one example, the head of St. Vincentius, the patron, was
adorned with a great quantity of gold, and with one jewel said to be
priceless; the treasury contained 70 gold and 50 silver cups, 2 silver
coffers, and 450 costly sacramental robes decked with jewels of great
value. The luxury, the artistic fancy, and the wealth which could minister
to both, all three were characteristic of the times, were lavished by the
Germans on their churches.
§ 2. Preaching.
On the other hand, preaching took a place it had never previously held in
the mediæval Church. Some distinguished Churchmen did not hesitate to say
that it was the most important duty the priest could perform—more
important than saying Mass. It was recognised that when the people began
to read the Bible and religious books in the vernacular, it became
necessary for the priests to be able to instruct their congregations
intelligently and sympathetically in sermons. Attempts were made to
provide the preachers with material for their sermon-making. The earliest
was the _Biblia Pauperum_ (the Bible for the _Pauperes Christi_, or the
preaching monks), which collects on one page pictures of Bible histories
fitted to explain each other, and adds short comments. Thus, on the
twenty-fifth leaf there are three pictures—in the centre the Crucifixion;
on the left Abraham about to slay Isaac, with the lamb in the foreground;
and on the left the Brazen Serpent and the healing of the Plague. More
scholarly preachers found a valuable commentary in the _Postilla_ of the
learned Franciscan Nicolas de Lyra (Lira or Lire, a village in Normandy),
who was the first real exegetical scholar, and to whom Luther was in later
days greatly indebted.(69)
Manuals of Pastoral Theology were also written and published for the
benefit of the parish priests,—the most famous, under the quaint title,
_Dormi Secure_ (sleep in safety). It describes the more important portions
of the service, and what makes a good sermon; it gives the Lessons for the
Sunday services, the chief articles of the Christian faith, find adds
directions for pastoral work and the cure of souls. It is somewhat
difficult to describe briefly the character of the preaching. Some of it
was very edifying and deservedly popular. The sermons of John Herolt were
printed, and attained a very wide circulation. No fewer than forty-one
editions appeared. Much of the preaching was the exposition of themes
taken from the Scholastic Theology treated in the most technical way. Many
of the preachers seem to have profaned their office in the search after
popularity, and mingled very questionable stories and coarse jokes with
their exhortations. The best known of the preachers who flourished at the
close of the fifteenth century was John Geiler of Keysersberg (in Elsass
near Colmar), the friend of Sebastian Brand, and a member of the Humanist
circle of Strassburg. The position he filled illustrates the eagerness of
men of the time to encourage preaching. A burgher of Strassburg, Peter
Schott, left a sum of money to endow a preacher, who was to be a doctor of
theology, one who had not taken monk’s vows, and who was to preach to the
people in the vernacular; a special pulpit was erected in the Strassburg
Minster for the preacher provided by this foundation, who was John Geiler.
His sermons are full of exhortations to piety and correct living. He
lashed the vices and superstitions of his time. He denounced relic
worship, pilgrimages, buying indulgences, and the corruptions in the
monasteries and convents. He spoke against the luxurious living of Popes
and prelates, and their trafficking in the sale of benefices. He made
sarcastic references to the papal decretals and to the quibblings of
Scholastic Theology. He paints the luxuries and vices he denounced so very
clearly, that his writings are a valuable mine for the historian of
popular morals. He was a stern preacher of morals, but his sermons contain
very little of the gospel message. As we read them we can understand
Luther’s complaint, that while he had listened to many a sermon on the
sins of the age, and to many a discourse expounding scholastic themes, he
had never heard one which declared the love of God to man in the mission
and work of Jesus Christ.
§ 3. Church Festivals.
The Church itself, recognising the fondness of the people for all kinds of
scenic display, delighted to gratify the prevailing taste by magnificent
processions, by gorgeous church ceremonial, by Passion and Miracle Plays.
Such scenes are continually described in contemporary chronicles. The
processions were arranged for Corpus Christi Day, for Christmas, for
Harvest Thanksgivings, when the civic fathers requested the clergy to pray
for rain, or when a great papal official visited the town. We hear of one
at Erfurt which began at five o’clock in the morning, and, with its visits
to the stations of the Cross and the services at each, did not end till
noon. The school children of the town, numbering 948, headed the
procession, then came 312 priests, then the whole University,—in all, 2141
persons,—and the monks belonging to the five monasteries followed. The
Holy Sacrament carried by the chief ecclesiastics, and preceded by a large
number of gigantic candles, occupied the middle of the procession. The
town council followed, then all the townsmen, then the women and maidens.
The troop of maidens was 2316 strong. They had garlands on their heads,
and their hair flowed down over their shoulders; they carried lighted
candles in their hands, and they marched modestly looking to the ground.
Two beautiful girls walked at their head with banners, followed by four
with lanterns. In the centre was the fairest, clad in black and barefoot,
carrying a large and splendid cross, and by her side one of the town
councillors chosen for his good looks. Everything was arranged with a view
to artistic effect.(70)
The Passion and Miracle Plays(71) were of great use in instructing the
people in the contents of Scripture, being almost always composed of
biblical scenes and histories. They were often very elaborate; sometimes
more than one hundred actors were needed to fill the parts; and the plays
were frequently so lengthy that they lasted for two or three days. The
ecclesiastical managers felt that the continuous presentation of grave and
lofty scenes and sentiments might weary their audiences, and they mixed
them with lighter ones, which frequently degenerated into buffoonery and
worse. The sacred and severe pathos of the Passion was interlarded with
coarse jokes about the devil; and the most solemn conceptions were
profaned. These Mysteries were generally performed in the great churches,
and the buildings dedicated to sacred things witnessed scenes of the
coarsest humour, to the detriment of all religious feeling. The more
serious Churchmen felt the profanation, and tried to prohibit the
performance of plays interlarded with rude and indecent scenes within the
churches and churchyards. Their interference came too late; the rough
popular taste demanded what it had been accustomed to; sacred histories
and customs coming down from a primitive heathenism were mixed together,
and the people lost the sense of sacredness which ought to attach itself
to the former. The Feast of the Ass, to mention one, was supposed to
commemorate the Flight to Egypt. A beautiful girl, holding a child in her
lap, was seated on an ass decked with splendid trappings of gold cloth,
and was led in procession by the clergy through the principal streets of
the town to the parish church. The girl on her ass was conducted into the
church and placed near the high altar, and the Mass and other services
were each concluded by the whole congregation braying. There is indeed an
old MS. extant with a rubric which orders the priest to bray thrice on
elevating the Host.(72) At other seasons of popular licence, all the parts
of the church service, even the most solemn, were parodied by the profane
youth of the towns.(73)
All this, however, tells us little about the intimate religious life and
feelings of the people, which is the important matter for the study of the
roots of the great ecclesiastical revolt.
When the evidence collected from the sources is sifted, it will be found
that the religious life of the people at the close of the fifteenth and
beginning of the sixteenth centuries is full of discordant elements, and
makes what must appear to us a very incongruous mosaic. If classification
be permissible, which it scarcely is (for religious types always refuse to
be kept distinct, and always tend to run into each other), one would be
disposed to speak of the simple homely piety of the family circle—the
religion taught at the mother’s knee, the _Kinderlehre_, as Luther called
it; of a certain flamboyant religion which inspired the crowds; of a calm
anti-clerical religion which grew and spread silently throughout Germany;
of the piety of the praying-circles, the descendants of the fourteenth
century Mystics.
§ 4. The Family Religious Life.
The biographies of some of the leaders of the Reformation, when they
relate the childish reminiscences of the writers, bear unconscious witness
to the kind of religion which was taught to the children in pious burgher
and peasant families. We know that Luther learned the Creed, the Ten
Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer. He knew such simple evangelical hymns
as “Ein kindelein so lobelich,”(74) “Nun bitten wir den heiligen Geist,”
and “Crist ist erstanden.” Children were rocked to sleep while the mothers
sang:
“Ach lieber Heere Jhesu Christ
Sid Du ein Kind gewesen bist,
So gib ouch disem Kindelin
Din Gnod und ouch den Segen den.
Ach Jhesu, Heere min,
Behüt diz Kindelin.
Nun sloff, nun sloff, min Kindelin,
Jhesus der sol din bülli sin,
Der well, daz dir getroume wol
Und werdest aller Tugent vol.
Ach Jhesus, Heere min,
Behüt diz Kindelin.”(75)
These songs or hymns, common before the Reformation, were sung as
frequently after the break with Rome. The continuity in the private
devotional life before and after the advent of the Reformation is a thing
to be noted. Few hymns were more popular during the last decade of the
fifteenth century than the “In dulci Jubilo” in which Latin and German
mingled. The first and last verses were:
“In dulci jubilo,
Nun singet und seid froh!
Unsers Herzens Wonne
Leit in præsepio,
Und leuchtet als die Sonne
Matris in gremio.
Alpha es et O,
Alpha es et O!
Ubi sunt gaudia?
Nirgends mehr denn da,
Da die Engel singen
Nova cantica,
Und die Schellen klingen
In regis curia.
Eya, wär’n wir da,
Eya, wär’n wir da!”
This hymn continued to enjoy a wonderful popularity in the German
Protestant churches and families until quite recently, and during the
times of the Reformation it spread far beyond Germany.(76) In the
fifteenth-century version it contained one verse in praise of the Virgin:
“Mater et filia
Du bist, Jungfraw Maria.
Wir weren all verloren
Per nostra crimina,
So hat sy uns erworben
Celorum gaudia.
Eya, wär’n wir da,
Eya, wär’n wir da!”
which was either omitted in the post-Reformation versions, or there was
substituted:
“O Patris charitas,
O Nati lenitas!
Wir weren all verloren
Per nostra crimina,
So hat Er uns erworben
Cœlorum gaudia.
Eya, wär’n wir da,
Eya, wär’n wir da.”(77)
Nor was direct simple evangelical instruction lacking. Friedrich Mecum
(known better by his Latinised name of Myconius), who was born in 1491,
relates how his father, a substantial burgher belonging to Lichtenfels in
Upper Franconia, instructed him in religion while he was a child. “My dear
father,” he says, “had taught me in my childhood the Ten Commandments, the
Lord’s Prayer, and the Creed, and constrained me to pray always. For, said
he, ‘Everything comes to us from God alone, and that _gratis_, free of
cost, and He will lead us and rule us, if we only diligently pray to
Him.’ ” We can trace this simple evangelical family religion away back
through the Middle Ages. In the wonderfully interesting Chronicle of
Brother Salimbene of the Franciscan Convent of Parma, which comes from the
thirteenth century, we are told how many of the better-disposed burghers
of the town came to the convent frequently to enjoy the religious
conversation of Brother Hugh. On one occasion the conversation turned upon
the mystical theology of Abbot Giaocchino di Fiore. The burghers professed
to be greatly edified, but said that they hoped that on the next evening
Brother Hugh would confine himself to telling them the _simple words of
Jesus_.
The central thought in all evangelical religion is that the believer does
not owe his position before God, and his assurance of salvation, to the
good deeds which he really can do, but to the grace of God manifested in
the mission and the work of Christ; and the more we turn from the thought
of what we can do to the thought of what God has done for us, the stronger
will be the conviction that simple trust in God is that by which the
pardoning grace of God is appropriated. This double conception—God’s grace
coming down upon us from above, and the believer’s trust rising from
beneath to meet and appropriate it—was never absent from the simplest
religion of the Middle Ages. It did not find articulate expression in
mediæval theology, for, owing to its enforced connection with Aristotelian
philosophy, that theology was largely artificial; but the thought itself
had a continuous and constant existence in the public consciousness of
Christian men and women, and appeared in sermons, prayers, and hymns, and
in the other ways in which the devotional life manifested itself. It is
found in the sermons of the greatest of mediæval preachers, Bernard of
Clairvaux, and in the teaching of the most persuasive of religious guides,
Francis of Assisi. The one, Bernard, in spite of his theological training,
was able to rise above the thought of human merit recommending the sinner
to God; and the other, Francis, who had no theological training at all,
insisted that he was fitted to lead a life of imitation simply because he
had no personal merits whatsoever, and owed everything to the marvellous
mercy and grace of God given freely to him in the work of Christ. The
thought that all the good we can do comes from the wisdom and mercy of
God, and that without these gifts of grace we are sinful and worthless—the
feeling that all pardon and all holy living are free gifts of God’s grace,
was the central thought round which in mediæval, as in all times, the
faith of simple and pious people twined itself. It found expression in the
simpler mediæval hymns, Latin and German. The utter need for sin-pardoning
grace is expressed and taught in the prayer of the _Canon of the Mass_. It
found its way, in spite of the theology, even into the official agenda of
the Church, where the dying are told that they must repose their
confidence upon Christ and His Passion as the sole ground of confidence in
their salvation. If we take the fourth book of Thomas à Kempis’ _Imitatio
Christi_, it is impossible to avoid seeing that his ideas about the
sacrament of the Supper (in spite of the mistakes in them) kept alive in
his mind the thought of a free grace of God, and that he had a clear
conception that God’s grace was freely given, and not merited by what man
can do. For the main thought with pious mediæval Christians, however it
might be overlaid with superstitious conceptions, was that they received
in the sacrament a _gift_ of overwhelming greatness. Many a modern
Christian seems to think that the main idea is that in this sacrament one
_does_ something—makes a profession of Christianity. The old view went a
long way towards keeping people right in spite of errors, while the modern
view does a great deal towards leading them wrong in spite of truth.
All these things combine to show us how there was a simple evangelical
faith among pious mediæval Christians, and that their lives were fed upon
the same divine truths which lie at the basis of Reformation theology. The
truths were all there, as poetic thoughts, as earnest supplication and
confession, in fervent preaching or in fireside teaching. When mediæval
Christians knelt in prayer, stood to sing their Redeemer’s praises, spoke
as a dying man to dying men, or as a mother to the children about her
knees, the words and thoughts that came were what Luther and Zwingli and
Calvin wove into Reformation creeds, and expanded into that experimental
theology which was characteristic of the Reformation.
When the printing-press began in the last decades of the fifteenth century
to provide little books to aid private and family devotion, it is not
surprising, after what has been said, to find how full many of them were
of simple evangelical piety. Some contained the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten
Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, and occasionally a translation or
paraphrase of some of the Psalms, notably the 51st Psalm. Popular
religious instructions and catechisms for family use were printed. The
Catechism of Dietrich Koelde (written in 1470) says: “Man must place his
faith and hope and love on God alone, and not in any creature; he must
trust in nothing but in the work of Jesus Christ.” The
_Seelenwurzgartlein_, a widely used book of devotion, instructs the
penitent: “Thou must place all thy hope and trust on nothing else than on
the work and death of Jesus Christ.” The _Geistliche Streit_ of Ulrich
Krafft (1503) teaches the dying man to place all his trust on the “mercy
and goodness of God, and not on his own good works.” Quotations might be
multiplied, all proving the existence of a simple evangelical piety, and
showing that the home experience of Friedrich Mecum (Myconius) was shared
in by thousands, and that there was a simple evangelical family religion
in numberless German homes in the end of the fifteenth century.
§ 5. A superstitious Religion based on Fear.
When sensitive, religiously disposed boys left pious homes, they could not
fail to come in contact with a very different kind of religion. Many did
not need to quit the family circle in order to meet it. Near Mansfeld,
Luther’s home, were noted pilgrimage places. Pilgrims, singly or in great
bands, passed to make their devotions before the wooden cross at
Kyffhäuser, which was supposed to effect miraculous cures. The Bruno
Quertfort Chapel and the old chapel at Welfesholz were pilgrimage places.
Sick people were carried to spots near the cloister church at Wimmelberg,
where they could best hear the sound of the cloister bells, which were
believed to have a healing virtue.
The latter half of the fifteenth century witnessed a great and
widespreading religious revival, which prolonged itself into the earlier
decades of the sixteenth, though the year 1475 may perhaps be taken as its
high-water mark. Its most characteristic feature was the impulse to make
pilgrimages to favoured shrines; and these pilgrimages were always
considered to be something in the nature of satisfactions made to God for
sins. With some of the earlier phenomena we have nothing here to do.
The impetus to pilgrimages given after the great Schism by the celebration
in 1456 of the first Jubilee “after healing the wounds of the Church”; the
relation of these pilgrimages to the doctrines of Indulgences which,
formulated by the great Schoolmen of the thirteenth century, had changed
the whole penitential system of the mediæval Church, must be passed over;
the curious socialist, anti-clerical, and yet deeply superstitious
movement led by the cowherd and village piper, Hans Böhm, has been
described. But one movement is so characteristic of the times, that it
must be noticed. In the years 1455-1459 all the chroniclers describe great
gatherings of children from every part of Germany, from town and village,
who, with crosses and banners, went on pilgrimage to St. Michael in
Normandy. The chronicler of Lübeck compares the spread of the movement to
the advance of the plague, and wonders whether the prompting arose from
the inspiration of God or from the instigation of the devil. When a band
of these child-pilgrims reached a town, carrying aloft crosses and banners
blazoned with a rude image of St. Michael, singing their special pilgrim
song,(78) the town’s children were impelled to join them. How this strange
epidemic arose, and what put an end to it, seems altogether doubtful; but
the chronicles of almost every important town in Germany attest the facts,
and the contemporary records of North France describe the bands of
youthful pilgrims who traversed the country to go to St. Michael’s Mount.
During these last decades of the fifteenth century, a great fear seems to
have brooded over Central Europe. The countries were scourged by incessant
visits of the plague; new diseases, never before heard of, came to swell
the terror of the people. The alarm of a Turkish invasion was always
before their eyes. Bells tolled at midday in hundreds of German parishes,
calling the parishioners together for prayer against the incoming of the
Turks, and served to keep the dread always present to their minds. Mothers
threatened their disobedient children by calling on the Turk to come and
take them. It was fear that lay at the basis of this crude revival of
religion which marks the closing decades of the fifteenth century. It gave
rise to an urgent restlessness. Prophecies of evil were easily believed
in. Astrologers assumed a place and wielded a power which was as new as it
was strange. The credulous people welcomed all kinds of revelations and
proclamations of miraculous signs. At Wilsnack, a village in one of the
divisions of Brandenburg (Priegnitz), it had been alleged since 1383 that
a consecrated wafer secreted the Blood of Christ. Suddenly, in 1475,
people were seized with a desire to make a pilgrimage to this shrine.
Swarms of child-pilgrims again filled the roads—boys and girls, from eight
to eighteen years of age, bareheaded, clad only in their shirts, shouting,
“O Lord, have mercy upon us”—going to Wilsnack. Sometimes schoolmasters
headed a crowd of pilgrims; mothers deserted their younger children;
country lads and maids left their work in the fields to join the
processions. These pilgrims came mostly from Central Germany (1100 from
Eisleben alone), but the contagion spread to Austria and Hungary, and
great bands of youthful pilgrims appeared from these countries. They
travelled without provisions, and depended on the charity of the peasants
for food. Large numbers of these child-pilgrims did not know why they had
joined the throng; they had never heard of the _Bleeding Host_ towards
which they were journeying; when asked why they had set out, they could
only answer that they could not help it, that they saw the red cross at
the head of their little band, and had to follow it. Many of them could
not speak, all went weeping and groaning, shivering as if they had a fit
of ague. An unnatural strength supported them. Little boys and girls, some
of them not eight years old, from a small village near Bamberg, were said
to have marched, on their first setting forth, all day and the first night
the incredible distance of not less than eighty miles! Some towns tried to
put a stop to these pilgrimages. Erfurt shut its gates against the
youthful companies. The pilgrimages ended as suddenly as they had
begun.(79)
Succeeding years witnessed similar astonishing pilgrimages—in 1489, to the
“black Mother of God” in Altötting; in 1492, to the “Holy Blood” at
Sternberg; in the same year, to the “pitiful Bone” at Dornach; in 1499, to
the picture of the Blessed Virgin at Grimmenthal; in 1500, to the head of
St. Anna at Düren; and in 1519, to the “Beautiful Mary” at Regensburg.
Apart altogether from these sporadic movements, the last decades of the
fifteenth century were pre-eminently a time of pilgrimages. German princes
and wealthy merchants made pilgrimages to the Holy Land, visited the
sacred places there, and returned with numerous relics, which they stored
in favourite churches. Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony, to be
known afterwards as the protector of Luther, made such a pilgrimage, and
placed the relics he had acquired in the Castle Church (the Church of All
Saints) in Wittenberg. He became an assiduous collector of relics, and had
commissioners on the Rhine, in the Netherlands, and at Venice, with orders
to procure him any sacred novelties they met with for sale.(80) He
procured from the Pope an Indulgence for all who visited the collection
and took part in the services of the church on All Saints’ Day; for it is
one of the ironies of history that the church on whose door Luther nailed
his theses against Indulgences was one of the sacred edifices on which an
Indulgence had been bestowed, and that the day selected by Luther was the
yearly anniversary, which drew crowds to benefit by it.(81)
A pilgrimage to the Holy Land was too costly and dangerous to be indulged
in by many. The richer Germans made pilgrimages to Rome, and the great
pilgrimage place for the middle-class or poorer Germans was Compostella in
Spain. Einsiedeln, in Switzerland, also attracted yearly swarms of
pilgrims.
Guide-books were written for the benefit of these pious travellers, and
two of them, the most popular, have recently been reprinted. They are the
_Mirabilia Romæ_ for Roman pilgrims, and the _Walfart und Strasse zu Sant
Jacob_ for travellers to Compostella. These little books had a wonderful
popularity. The _Mirabilia Romæ_ went through nineteen Latin and at least
twelve German editions before the year 1500; it was also translated into
Italian and Dutch. It describes the various shrines at Rome where pilgrims
may win special gifts of grace by visiting and worshipping at them. Who
goes to the Lateran Church and worships there has “forgiveness of all
sins, both guilt and penalty.” There is “a lovely little chapel” (probably
what is now called the Lateran Baptistry) near the Lateran, where the same
privileges may be won. The pilgrim who goes with good intention to the
High Altar of St. Peter’s Church, “even if he has murdered his father or
his mother,” is freed from all sin, “guilt as well as penalty,” provided
he repents. The virtues of St. Croce seem to have been rated even higher.
If a man leaves his house with the intention of going to the shrine, even
if he die by the way, all his sins are forgiven him; and if he visits the
church he wins a thousand years’ relief from Purgatory.(82)
Compostella in Spain was the people’s pilgrimage place. Before the
invention of printing we find traces of manuscript guides to travellers,
which were no doubt circulated among intending pilgrims, and afterwards
the services of the printing-press were early called in to assist. In the
Spanish archives at Simancas there are two single sheets, one of which
states the numerous Indulgences for the benefit of visitors at the shrine
of St. James, while the other enumerates the relics which are to be seen
and visited there. It mentions thirty-nine great relics—from the bones of
St. James, which lay under the great altar of the cathedral, to those of
St. Susanna, which were interred in a church outside the walls of the
town.(83) These leaflets were sold to the pilgrims, and were carried back
by them to Germany, where they stimulated the zeal and devotion of those
who intended to make the pilgrimage. Our pilgrim’s guide-book, the
_Walfart und Strasse zu Sant Jacob_,(84) deals almost exclusively with the
road. The author was a certain Hermann Künig of Vach, who calls himself a
_Mergen-knecht_, or servant of the Virgin Mary. The well-known pilgrim
song, “Of Saint James” (_Von Sant Jacob_), told how those who reached the
end of their journey got, through the intercession of St. James,
forgiveness from the guilt and penalty (_von Pein und Schuldt_) of all
their sins; it tells the pilgrims to provide themselves with two pairs of
shoes, a water-bottle and spoon, a satchel and staff, a broad-brimmed hat
and a cloak, both trimmed with leather in the places likeliest to be
frayed, and both needed as a protection against wind and rain and
snow.(85) It charges them to take permits from their parish priests to
dispense with confession, for they were going to foreign lands where they
would not find priests who spoke German. It warns them that they might die
far from home and find a grave on the pilgrimage route. Our guide-book
omits all these things. It is written by a man who has made the pilgrimage
on foot; who had observed minutely all the turns of the road, and could
warn fellow-pilgrims of the difficulties of the way. He gives the
itinerary from town to town; where to turn to the right and where to the
left; what conspicuous buildings mark the proper path; where the traveller
will find people who are generous to poor pilgrims, and where the
inhabitants are uncharitable and food and drink must be paid for; where
hostels abound, and those parts of the road on which there are few, and
where the pilgrims must buy their provisions beforehand and carry them in
their satchels; where sick pilgrims can find hospitals on the way, and
what treatment they may expect there;(86) at what hostels they must change
their money into French and Spanish coin. In brief, the booklet is a
mediæval “Baedeker,” compiled with German accuracy for the benefit of
German pilgrims to the renowned shrine of St. James of Compostella. This
little book went through several editions between 1495 and 1521, and is of
itself a proof of the popularity of this pilgrimage place. In the last
decades of the fifteenth century there arose a body of men and women who
might be called professional pilgrims, and who were continually on the
road between Germany and Spain. A pilgrimage was one of the earliest
so-called “satisfactions” which might be done vicariously, and the
Brethren of St. James (_Jacobs-Brueder_) made the pilgrimage regularly,
either on behalf of themselves or of others.
Many of these pilgrims were men and women of indifferent character,(87)
who had been sent on a pilgrimage as an ecclesiastical punishment for
their sins. The _Chronicles of the Zimmer Family_(88) gives several cases
of criminals, who had committed murder or theft or other serious crimes
between 1490 and 1520, who were sent to Santiago as a punishment. Even in
the last decades of the fifteenth century, when the greater part of the
pilgrims were devout in their way, it was known only too well that
pilgrimages were not helpful to a moral life. Stern preachers of
righteousness like Geiler of Keysersberg and Berchtold of Regensburg
denounced pilgrimages, and said that they created more sins than they
yielded pardons.(89) Parish priests continually forbade their women
penitents, especially if they were unmarried, from going on a pilgrimage.
But these warnings and rebukes were in vain. The prevailing terror had
possessed the people, and they journeyed from shrine to shrine seeking
some relief for their stricken consciences.
A marked characteristic of this revival which found such striking outcome
in these pilgrimages was the thought that Jesus was to be looked upon as
the Judge who was to come to punish the wicked. His saving and
intercessory work was thrust into the background. Men forgot that He was
the Saviour and the Intercessor; and as the human heart craves for someone
to intercede for it, another intercessor had to be found. This gracious
personality was discovered in the Virgin Mother, who was to be entreated
to intercede with her Son on behalf of poor sinning human creatures. The
last half of the fifteenth century saw a deep-seated and widely-spread
craving to cling to the protection of the Virgin Mother with a strength
and intensity hitherto unknown in mediæval religion. It witnessed the
furthest advance that had yet been made towards what must be called
Mariolatry. This devotion expressed itself, as religious emotion
continually does, in hymns; a very large proportion of the mediæval hymns
in praise of the Virgin were written in the second half of the fifteenth
century—the period of this strange revival based upon fear. Dread of the
Son as Judge gave rise to the devotion to the Mother as the intercessor.
Little books for private and family devotion were printed, bearing such
titles as the _Pearl of the Passion_ and the _Little Gospel_, containing,
with long comments, the words of our Lord on the cross to John and to
Mary. She became the ideal woman, the ideal mother, the “Mother of God,”
the _mater dolorosa_, with her heart pierced by the sword, the sharer in
the redemptive sufferings of her Son, retaining her sensitive woman’s
heart, ready to listen to the appeals of a suffering, sorrowful humanity.
We can see this devotion to the Virgin Mother impregnating the social
revolts from Hans Böhm to Joss Fritz. The theology of the schools followed
in the wake of the popular sentiment, and the doctrine of the Immaculate
Conception was more strictly defined and found its most strenuous
supporters during the later decades of this fifteenth century.
The thought of motherly intercession went further; the Virgin herself had
to be interceded with to induce her to plead with her Son for men sunk in
sin, and _her_ mother (St. Anna) became the object of a cult which may
almost be said to be quite new. Hymns were written in her praise.(90)
Confraternities, modelled on the confraternities dedicated to the Blessed
Virgin, were formed in order to bring the power of the prayers of numbers
to bear upon her. These confraternities spread all over Germany and beyond
it.(91) It is almost possible to trace the widening area of the cult from
the chronicles of the period. The special cult of the Virgin seems to have
begun, at least in its extravagant popular form, in North France, and to
have spread from France through Germany and Spain; but so far as it can be
traced, this cult of St. Anna, “the Grandmother,” had a German origin, and
the devotion manifested itself most deeply on German soil. Even the
Humanist poets sang her praises with enthusiasm, and such collectors of
relics as Frederick of Saxony and the Cardinal Archbishop of Mainz
rejoiced when they were able to add a thumb of St. Anna to their store.
Luther himself tells us that “St. Anna was his idol”; and Calvin speaks of
his mother’s devotion to the saint. Her name was graven on many a parish
church bell, and every pull at the ropes and clang of the bell was
supposed to be a prayer to her to intercede. The Virgin and St. Anna
brought in their train other saints who were also believed to be the true
intercessors. The three bells of the church in which Luther was baptized
bore the following inscriptions carved deeply in the brass:—“God help us;
Mary have mercy. 1499.” “Help us Anna, also St. Peter, St. Paul. 1509.”
“Help us God, Mary, Anna, St. Peter, Paul, Arnold, Stephan, Simon. 1509.”
The popular religion always represented Jesus, Mecum (Myconius) tells us,
as the stern Judge who would convict and punish all those who had not
secured righteousness by the intercession of the saints or by their own
good works.
This revival of religion, crude as it was, and based on fear, had a
distinct effect for good on a portion of the clergy, and led to a great
reformation of morals among those who came under its influence. The papal
Schism, which had lasted till 1449, had for one of its results the
weakening of all ecclesiastical discipline, and its consequences were seen
in the growing immorality which pervaded all classes of the clergy. So far
as one can judge, the revival of religion described above had not very
much effect on the secular clergy. Whether we take the evidence from the
chronicles of the time or from visitations of the bishops, the morals of
the parish priests were extremely low, and the private lives of the higher
clergy in Germany notoriously corrupt. The occupants of episcopal sees
were for the most part the younger brothers of the great princes, and had
been placed in the religious life for the sake of the ecclesiastical
revenues. The author of the _Chronicles of the Zimmer Family_ tells us
that at the festive gatherings which accompanied the meetings of the Diet,
the young nobles, lay and clerical, spent most of their time at dice and
cards. As he passed through the halls, picking his way among groups of
young nobles lying on the floor (for tables and chairs were rare in these
days), he continually heard the young count call out to the young bishop,
“Play up, parson; it is your turn.” The same writer describes the retinue
of a great prelate, who was always accompanied to the Diet by a concubine
dressed in man’s clothes. Nor were the older Orders of monks, the
Benedictines and their offshoots, greatly influenced by the revival. It
was different, however, with those Orders of monks who came into close
contact with the people, and caught from them the new fervour. The
Dominicans, the great preaching Order, were permeated by reform. The
Franciscans, who had degenerated sadly from their earlier lives of
self-denial, partook of a new life. Convent after convent reformed itself,
and the inmates began to lead again the lives their founder had
contemplated. The fire of the revival, however, burnt brightest among the
Augustinian Eremites, the Order which Luther joined, and they represented,
as none of the others did, all the characteristics of the new movement.
These Augustinian Eremites had a somewhat curious history. They had
nothing in common with St. Augustine save the name, and the fact that a
Pope had given them the rule of St. Augustine as a basis for their
monastic constitution. They had originally been hermits, living solitary
lives in mountainous parts of Italy and of Germany. Many Popes had desired
to bring them under conventual rule, and this was at last successfully
done. They shared as no other Order had done in the revival of the second
half of the fifteenth century, and exhibited in their lives all its
religious characteristics. No Order of monks contained such devoted
servants of the Virgin Mother. She was the patron along with St.
Augustine. Her image stood in the chapter-house of every convent. The
theologians of the Augustinian Eremites vied with those of the Franciscans
in spreading the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. They did much to
spread the cult of the “Blessed Anna.” They were devoted to the Papacy.
One of their learned men, John of Palz, one of the two professors of
theology in the Erfurt Convent when Luther entered it as a novice, was the
most strenuous defender of the doctrine of Attrition and of the religious
value of Indulgences. With all this their lives were more self-denying
than those of most monks. They cultivated theological learning, and few
Universities in Germany were without an Augustinian Eremite who acted as
professor of philosophy or of theology. They also paid great attention to
the art of preaching, and every large monastery had a special preacher who
attracted crowds of the laity to the convent chapel. Their monasteries
were usually placed in large towns; and their devout lives, their
learning, and the popular gifts of their preachers, made them favourites
with the townspeople. They were the most esteemed Order in Germany.
These last decades of the fifteenth century were the days of the
resuscitation of the mendicant Orders and the revival of their power over
the people. The better disposed among the princes and among the wealthier
burghers invariably selected their confessors from the monks of the
mendicant Orders, and especially from the Augustinian Eremites. The
chapels of the Franciscans and of the Eremites were thronged, and those of
the parish clergy were deserted. The common people took for their
religious guides men who shared the new revival, and who proved their
sincerity by self-denying labours. It was in vain that the Roman Curia
published regulations insisting that every parishioner must confess to the
priest of the parish at least once a year, and that it explained again and
again that the personal character of the ministrant did not affect the
efficacy of the sacraments administered by him. So long as poorly clad,
emaciated, clean-living Franciscan or Eremite priests could be found to
act as confessors, priests, or preachers, the people deserted the parish
clergy, flocked to their confessionals, waited on their serving the Mass,
and thronged their chapels to listen to their sermons. These decades were
the time of the last revival of the mendicant monks, who were the
religious guides in this flamboyant popular religion which is so much in
evidence during our period.
§ 6. A non-Ecclesiastical Religion.
The third religious movement which belongs to the last decades of the
fifteenth and the earlier decades of the sixteenth century was of a kind
so different from, and even contrary to, what has just been described,
that it is with some surprise that the student finds he must recognise its
presence alongside of the other. It was the silent spread of a quiet,
sincere, but non-ecclesiastical religion. Historians usually say nothing
about this movement, and it is only a minute study of the town chronicles
and of the records of provincial and municipal legislation that reveals
its power and extent. It has always been recognised that Luther’s father
was a man of a deeply religious turn of mind, although he commonly
despised the clergy, and thought that most monks were rogues or fools; but
what is not recognised is that in this he represented thousands of quiet
and pious Germans in all classes of society. We find traces of the silent,
widespreading movement in the ecclesiastical legislation of German
princes, in the police regulations, and in the provisions for the support
of the poor among the burghers; in the constitutions and practices of the
confraternities among the lower classes, and especially among the artisans
in the towns; and in the numerous translations of the Vulgate into the
vernacular.
The reforms sketched by the Councils of Constance and of Basel had been
utterly neglected by the Roman Curia, and in consequence several German
princes, while they felt the hopelessness of insisting on a general
purification of the Church, resolved that these reforms should be carried
out within their own dominions. As early as 1446, Duke William of Saxony
had published decrees which interfered with the pretensions of the Church
to be quite independent of the State. His regulations about the observance
of the Sunday, his forbidding ecclesiastical courts to interfere with
Saxon laymen, his stern refusal to allow any Saxon to appeal to a foreign
jurisdiction, were all more or less instances of the interference of the
secular power within what had been supposed to be the exclusive province
of the ecclesiastical. He went much further, however. He enacted that it
belonged to the secular power to see that parish priests and their
superiors within his dominions lived lives befitting their vocation—a
conception which was entirely at variance with the ecclesiastical
pretensions of the Middle Ages. He also declared it to be within the
province of the secular power to visit officially and to reform all the
convents within his dominions. So far as proofs go, it is probable that
these declarations about the rights of the civil authorities to exercise
discipline over the parish priests and their superiors remained a dead
letter. We hear of no such reformation being carried out. But the
visitation of the Saxon monasteries was put in force in spite of the
protests of the ecclesiastical powers. Andreas Proles would never have
been able to carry out his proposals of reform in the convents of the
Augustinian Eremites but for the support he received from the secular
princes against his ecclesiastical superiors in Rome. The Dukes Ernest and
Albrecht carried out Duke William’s conceptions about the relation of the
civil to the ecclesiastical authorities in their ordinances of 1483, and
the Elector Frederick the Wise was heir to this ecclesiastical policy of
his family.
The records of the Electorate of Brandenburg, investigated by Priebatsch
and described by him in the _Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte_(92)
testify to the same ideas at work there. A pious prince like Frederick II.
of Brandenburg removed unworthy Church dignitaries and reinstituted them,
thus taking upon himself the oversight of the Church. Appeals to Rome were
forbidden under penalties. Gradually under Frederick and his successors
there arose what was practically a national Church of Brandenburg, which
was almost completely under the control of the civil power, and almost
entirely separated from Roman control.
The towns also interfered in what had hitherto been believed to be within
the exclusive domain of the ecclesiastical authorities. They recognised
the harm which the numerous Church festivals and saints’ days were doing
to the people, and passed regulations about their observance, all of them
tending to lessen the number of the days on which men were compelled by
ecclesiastical law to be idle. When Luther pleaded in his _Address to the
Nobility of the German Nation_ for the abolition of the ecclesiastical
laws enforcing idleness on the numerous ecclesiastical holy days, he only
suggested an extension and wider application of the police regulations
which were in force within his native district of Mansfeld.
This non-ecclesiastical feeling appears strongly in the change of view
about Christian charity which marks the close of the fifteenth century.
Nothing shows how the Church of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
had instilled the mind of Jesus into the peoples of Europe like the zeal
with which they tried to do their duty by the poor, the sick, and the
helpless. Institutions, founded by individuals or by corporations, for the
purpose of housing the destitute abounded, and men and women willingly
dedicated themselves to the service of the unfortunate.
“The Beguins crowned with flapping hats,
O’er long-drawn bloodless faces blank,
And gowns unwashed to wrap their lank
Lean figures,”(93)
were sisters of mercy in every mediæval town. Unfortunately the lessons of
the Church included the thought that begging was a Christian virtue; while
the idea that because charity is taught by the law of Christ, its exercise
must be everywhere superintended by ecclesiastics, was elevated to a
definite principle of action, if not to something directly commanded by
the law of God. The Reformation protested against these two ideas, and the
silent anticipation of this protest is to be found in the
non-ecclesiastical piety of the close of the fifteenth century.
The practice of begging, its toleration and even encouragement, was almost
universal. In some of the benevolent institutions the sick and the
pensioners were provided from the endowment with all the necessaries of
life, but it was generally thought becoming that they should beg them from
the charitable. The very fact of begging seemed to raise those who shared
in it to the level of members of a religious association. St. Francis, the
“imitator of Christ,” had taught his followers to beg, and this great
example sanctified the practice. It is true that the begging friars were
always the butt of the satirists of the close of the fifteenth century.
They delighted to portray the mendicant monk, with his sack, into which he
seemed able to stuff everything: honey and spice, nutmegs, pepper, and
preserved ginger, cabbage and eggs, poultry, fish, and new clothes, milk,
butter, and cheese; cheese especially, and of all kinds—ewe’s milk and
goat’s milk, hard cheese and soft cheese, large cheeses and small
cheeses—were greedily demanded by these “cheese hunters,” as they were
satirically called. On their heels tramped a host of semi-ecclesiastical
beggars, all of them with professional names—men who begged for a church
that was building, or for an altar-cloth, or to hansel a young priest at
his first Mass; men who carried relics about for the charitable to
kiss—some straw from the manger of Bethlehem, or a feather from the wing
of the angel Gabriel; the Brethren of St. James, who performed continual
and vicarious pilgrimages to Compostella, and sometimes robbed and
murdered on the road; the Brethren of St. Anthony, who had the special
privilege of wearing a cross and carrying a bell on their begging visits.
These were all ecclesiastical beggars. The ordinary beggars did their best
to obtain some share of the sanctity which surrounded the profession; they
carried with them the picture of some saint, or placed the cockle-shell,
the badge of a pilgrim, in their hats, and secured a quasi-ecclesiastical
standing.(94) Luther expressed not merely his own opinion on this plague
of beggars in his _Address to the Nobility of the German Nation_, but what
had been thought and partially practised by quiet laymen for several
decades. Some towns began to make regulations against promiscuous begging
by able-bodied persons, provided work for them, seized their children, and
taught them trades—all of which sensible doings were against the spirit of
the mediæval Church.
The non-ecclesiastical religious feeling, however, appears much more
clearly when the history of the charitable foundations is examined. The
invariable custom during the earlier Middle Ages was that charitable
bequests were left to the management of the Church and the clergy. At the
close of the fifteenth century the custom began to alter. The change from
clerical to lay management was at first probably due mainly to the
degeneracy of the clergy, and to the belief that the funds set apart for
the poor were not properly administered. The evidences of this are to be
found in numerous instances of the civic authorities attempting, and
successfully, to take the management of charitable foundations out of the
hands of ecclesiastical authorities, and to vest them in lay management.
But this cannot have been the case always. We should rather say that it
began to dawn upon men that although charity was part of the law of
Christ, this did not necessarily mean that all charities must be placed
under the control of the clergy or other ecclesiastical administrators.
Hence we find during the later years of the fifteenth century continual
instances of bequests for the poor placed in the hands of the town council
or of boards of laymen. That this was done without any animus against the
Church is proved by the fact that the same testator is found giving
benefactions to foundations which are under clerical and to others under
lay management. Out of the funds thus accumulated the town councils began
a system of caring for the poor of the city, which consisted in giving
tokens which could be exchanged for so much bread or woollen cloth, or
shoes, or wood for firing, at the shops of dealers who were engaged for
the purpose. How far this new and previously unheard of lay management, in
what had hitherto been the peculiar possession of the clergy, had spread
before the close of the fifteenth century, it is impossible to say. No
archæologist has yet made an exhaustive study of the evidence lying buried
in archives of the mediæval towns of Germany; but enough has been
collected by Kriegk(95) and others to show that it had become very
extensive. The laity saw that they were quite able to perform this
peculiarly Christian work apart from any clerical direction.
Another interesting series of facts serves also to show the growth of a
non-ecclesiastical religious sentiment. The later decades of the fifteenth
century saw the rise of innumerable associations, some of them definitely
religious, and all of them with a religious side, which are unlike what we
meet with earlier. They did not aim to be, like the praying circles of the
Mystics or of the _Gottesfreunde, ecclesiolæ in ecclesia_, strictly
non-clerical or even anti-clerical. They had no difficulty in placing
themselves under the protection of the Church, in selecting the ordinary
ecclesiastical buildings for their special services, and in employing
priests to conduct their devotions; but they were distinctively lay
associations, and lived a religious life in their own way, without any
regard to the conceptions of the higher Christian life which the Church
was accustomed to present to its devout disciples. Some were associations
for prayer; others for the promotion of the “cult” of a special saint,
like the confraternities dedicated to the Virgin Mother or the
associations which spread the “cult” of the Blessed Anna; but by far the
largest number were combinations of artisans, and resembled the workmen’s
“gilds” of the Roman Empire.
Perhaps one of the best known of these associations formed for the purpose
of encouraging prayer was the “Brotherhood of the Eleven Thousand
Virgins,” commonly known under the quaint name of _St. Ursula’s Little
Ship_. The association was conceived by a Carthusian monk of Cologne, and
it speedily became popular. Frederick the Wise was one of its patrons, his
secretary, Dr. Pfeffinger, one of its supporters; it numbered its
associates by the thousand; its praises were sung in a quaint old German
hymn.(96) No money dues were exacted from its members. The only duty
exacted was to pray regularly, and to learn to better one’s life through
the power of prayer. This was one type of the pious brotherhoods of the
fifteenth century. It was the best known of its kind, and there were many
others. But among the brotherhoods which bear testimony to the spread of a
non-ecclesiastical piety none are more important than the confraternities
which went by the names of _Kalands_ or _Kalandsgilden_ in North Germany
and _Zechen_ in Austria. These associations were useful in a variety of
ways. They were unions for the practice of religion; for mutual aid in
times of sickness; for defence in attack; and they also served the purpose
of insurance societies and of burial clubs. It is with their religious
side that we have here to do. It was part of the bond of association that
all the brethren and sisters (for women were commonly admitted) should
meet together at stated times for a common religious service. The
brotherhood selected the church in which this was held, and so far as we
can see the chapels of the Franciscans or of the Augustinian Eremites were
generally chosen. Sometimes an altar was relegated to their exclusive use;
sometimes, if the church was a large one, a special chapel. The
interesting thing to be noticed is that the rules and the modes of
conducting the religious services of the association were entirely in the
hands of the brotherhood itself, and that these laymen insisted on
regulating them in their own way. Luther has a very interesting sermon,
entitled _Sermon upon the venerable Sacrament of the holy true Body of
Christ and of the Brotherhoods_, the latter half of which is devoted to a
contrast between good brotherhoods and evil ones. Those brotherhoods are
evil, says Luther, in which the religion of the brethren is expressed in
hearing a Mass on one or two days of the year, while by guzzling and
drinking continually at the meetings of the brotherhood, they contrive to
serve the devil the greater part of their time. A true brotherhood spreads
its table for its poorer members, it aids those who are sick or infirm, it
provides marriage portions for worthy young members of the association. He
ends with a comparison between the true brotherhood and the Church of
Christ. Theodore Kolde remarks that a careful monograph on the
brotherhoods of the end of the fifteenth century in the light of this
sermon of Luther’s would afford great information about the popular
religion of the period. Unfortunately, no one has yet attempted the task,
but German archæologists are slowly preparing the way by printing, chiefly
from MS. sources, accounts of the constitution and practices of many of
these Kalands.
From all this it may be seen that there was in these last decades of the
fifteenth and in the earlier of the sixteenth centuries the growth of what
may be called a non-ecclesiastical piety, which was quietly determined to
bring within the sphere of the laity very much that had been supposed to
belong exclusively to the clergy. The _jus episcopale_ which Luther
claimed for the civil authorities in his tract on the _Liberty of the
Christian Man_, had, in part at least, been claimed and exercised in
several of the German principalities and municipalities; the practice of
Christian charity and its management were being taken out of the hands of
the clergy and entrusted to the laity; and the brotherhoods were making it
apparent that men could mark out their religious duties in a way deemed
most suitable for themselves without asking any aid from the Church,
further than to engage a priest whom they trusted to conduct divine
service and say the Masses they had arranged for.
The appearance of numerous translations of the Scriptures into the
vernacular, unauthorised by the officials of the mediæval Church, and
jealously suspected by them, appears to confirm the growth and spread of
this non-ecclesiastical piety. The relation of the Church of the Middle
Ages, earlier and later, to vernacular translations of the Vulgate is a
complex question. The Scriptures were always declared to be the supreme
source and authority for all questions of doctrines and morals, and in the
earlier stages of the Reformation controversy the supreme authority of the
Holy Scriptures was not supposed to be one of the matters in dispute
between the contending parties. This is evident when we remember that the
_Augsburg __ Confession_, unlike the later confessions of the Reformed
Churches, does not contain any article affirming the supreme authority of
Scripture. That was not supposed to be a matter of debate. It was reserved
for the Council of Trent, for the first time, to place _traditiones sine
Scripto_ on the same level of authority with the Scriptures of the Old and
New Testaments. Hence, many of the small books, issued from convent
presses for the instruction of the people during the decades preceding the
Reformation, frequently declare that the whole teaching of the Church is
to be found within the books of the Holy Scriptures.
It is, of course, undoubted that the mediæval Church forbade over and over
again the reading of the Scriptures in the Vulgate and especially in the
vernacular, but it may be asserted that these prohibitions were almost
always connected with attempts to suppress heretical or schismatic
revolts.(97)
On the other hand, no official encouragement of the reading of the
Scriptures in the vernacular by the people can be found during the whole
of the Middle Ages, nor any official patronage of vernacular translations.
The utmost that was done in the way of tolerating, it can scarcely be said
of encouraging, a knowledge of the vernacular Scriptures was the issue of
Psalters in the vernacular, of Service-Books, and, in the fifteenth
century, of the _Plenaria_—little books which contained translations of
some of the paragraphs of the Gospels and Epistles read in the Church
service accompanied with legends and popular tales. Translations of the
Scriptures were continually reprobated by Popes and primates for various
reasons.(98) It is also unquestionable that a knowledge of the Scriptures
in the vernacular, especially by uneducated men and women, was almost
always deemed a sign of heretical tendency. “The third cause of heresy,”
says an Austrian inquisitor, writing about the end of the thirteenth
century, “is that they translate the Old and New Testaments into the
vulgar tongue; and so they learn and teach. I have heard and seen a
certain country clown who repeated the Book of Job word for word, and
several who knew the New Testament perfectly.”(99) A survey of the
evidence seems to lead to the conclusion that the rulers of the mediæval
Church regarded a knowledge of the vernacular Scriptures with grave
suspicion, but that they did not go the length of condemning entirely
their possession by persons esteemed trustworthy, whether clergy, monks,
nuns, or distinguished laymen.
Yet we have in the later Middle Ages, ever since Wiclif produced his
English version, the gradual publication of the Scriptures in the
vernaculars of Europe. This was specially so in Germany; and when the
invention of printing had made the diffusion of literature easy, it is
noteworthy that the earliest presses in Germany printed many more books
for family and private devotion, many more _Plenaria_, and many more
editions of the Bible than of the classics. Twenty-two editions of the
Psalter in German appeared before 1509, and twenty-five of the Gospels and
Epistles before 1518. No less than fourteen (some say seventeen) versions
of the whole Bible were printed in High-German and three in Low-German
during the last decades of the fifteenth and the earlier decades of the
sixteenth century—all translations from the Vulgate. The first was issued
by John Metzel in Strassburg in 1466. Then followed another Strassburg
edition in 1470, two Augsburg editions in 1473, one in the Swiss dialect
in 1474, two in Augsburg in 1477, one in Augsburg in 1480, one in Nürnberg
in 1483, one in Strassburg in 1485, and editions in Augsburg in 1487,
1490, 1507, and 1518. A careful comparison of these printed vernacular
Bibles proves that the earlier editions were independent productions; but
as edition succeeded edition the text became gradually assimilated until
there came into existence a German Vulgate, which was used
indiscriminately by those who adhered to the mediæval Church and those who
were dissenters from it. These German versions were largely, but by no
means completely, displaced by Luther’s translation. The Anabaptists, for
example, retained this German Vulgate long after the publication of
Luther’s version, and these pre-Reformation German Bibles were to be found
in use almost two hundred years after the Reformation.(100)
Whence sprang the demand for these vernacular versions of the Holy
Scriptures? That the leaders of the mediæval Church viewed their existence
with alarm is evident from the proclamation of the Primate of Germany,
Berthold of Mainz, issued in 1486, ordering a censorship of books with
special reference to vernacular translations of the Scriptures.(101) On
the other hand, there is no evidence that these versions were either
wholly or in great part the work of enemies of the mediæval Church. The
mediæval _Brethren_, as they called themselves (Waldenses, Picards,
Wiclifites, Hussites, etc., were names given to them very indiscriminately
by the ecclesiastical authorities), had translations of the Scriptures
both in the Romance and in the Teutonic languages as early as the close of
the thirteenth century. The records of inquisitors and of councils prove
it. But there is no evidence to connect any of these German versions,
save, perhaps, one at Augsburg, and that issued by the Koburgers in
Nürnberg, with these earlier translations. The growing spread of education
in the fifteenth century, and, above all, the growth of a
non-ecclesiastical piety which claimed to examine and to judge for itself,
demanded and received these numerous versions of the Holy Scriptures in
the vulgar tongue.(102) The “common man” had the word of God in his hands,
could read, meditate, and judge for himself. The effect of the presence of
these vernacular Scriptures is apt to be exaggerated.(103) The Humanist,
Conrad Celtes, might threaten the priests that the Bible would soon be
seen in every village tavern; but we know that in these days of early
printing a complete Bible must have been too expensive to be purchased by
a poor man. Still he could get the Gospels or the Epistles, or the
Psalter; and there is evidence, apart from the number of editions, that
the people were buying and were studying the Scriptures. Preachers were
exhorted to give the meaning of the passages of Scripture read in Church
to prevent the people being confused by the different ways in which the
text was translated in the Bibles in their possession. Stories were told
of peasants, like Hans Werner, who worsted their parish priests in
arguments drawn from Scripture. The ecclesiastical authorities were
undoubtedly anxious, and their anxiety was shared by many who desired a
reformation in life and manners, but dreaded any revolutionary movement.
It was right that the children should be fed with the Bread of Life, but
Mother Church ought to keep the bread-knife in her hands lest the children
cut their fingers. Some publishers of the translations inserted prefaces
saying that the contents of the volumes should be understood in the way
taught by the Church, as was done in the _Book of the Gospels_, published
at Basel in 1514. But in spite of all a lay religion had come into being,
and laymen were beginning to think for themselves in matters where
ecclesiastics had hitherto been considered the sole judges.
§ 7. The “Brethren.”
There was another type of religious life and pious association which
existed, and which seems in one form or other to have exercised a great
influence among the better class of artisans, and more especially among
the printers of Augsburg, Nürnberg, and Strassburg.
It is probable that this type of piety had at least three roots.
(_a_) We can trace as far back as the closing years of the thirteenth
century, in many parts of Germany, the existence of nonconformists who, on
the testimony of inquisitors, lived pious lives, acted righteously towards
their neighbours, and believed in all the articles of the Christian faith,
but repudiated the Roman Church and the clergy. Their persecutors gave
them a high character. “The heretics are known by their walk and
conversation: they live quietly and modestly; they have no pride in dress;
their learned men are tailors and weavers; they do not heap up riches, but
are content with what is necessary; they live chastely; they are temperate
in eating and drinking; they never go to taverns, nor to public dances,
nor to any such vanities; they refrain from all foul language, from
backbiting, from thoughtless speech, from lying and from swearing.” The
list of objections which they had to usages of the mediæval Church are
those which would occur to any evangelical Protestant of this century.
They professed a simple evangelical creed; they offered a passive
resistance to the hierarchical and priestly pretensions of the clergy;
they were careful to educate their children in schools which they
supported; they had vernacular translations of the Scriptures, and
committed large portions to memory; they conducted their religious service
in the vernacular, and it was one of the accusations made against them
that they alleged that the word of God was as profitable when read in the
vernacular as when studied in Latin. It is also interesting to know that
they were accused of visiting the leper-houses to pray with the inmates,
and that in some towns they had schools for the leper children.(104) They
called themselves the _Brethren_. The societies of the _Brethren_ had
never died out. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they were
continually subject to local and somewhat spasmodic persecutions, when the
ecclesiastical could secure the aid of the secular authorities to their
schemes of repression, which was not always possible. They were strongly
represented among the artisans in the great cities, and there are
instances when the civic authorities gave them one of the churches of the
towns for their services. The liability to intermittent persecution led to
an organisation whereby the _Brethren_, who were for the time being living
in peace, made arrangements to receive and support those who were able to
escape from any district where the persecution raged. These societies were
in correspondence with their brethren all over Europe, and were never so
active as during the last decades of the fifteenth and the first quarter
of the sixteenth century.
(_b_) As early as the times of Meister Eckhart (d. 1327), of his disciples
Tauler (d. 1361) and Suso (d 1366), of the mysterious “Friend of God in
the Oberland” and his associates (among them the Strassburg merchant
Rulman Merswin (d. 1382)), and of the Brussels curate John Ruysbroeck (d.
1381), the leaders of the mediæval Mystics had been accustomed to gather
their followers together into praying circles; and the custom was
perpetuated long after their departure. How these pious associations
continued to exist in the half century before the Reformation, and what
forms their organisation took, it seems impossible to say with any
accuracy. The school system of the _Brethren __ of the Common Lot_, which
always had an intimate connection with the _Gottesfreunde_, in all
probability served to spread the praying circles which had come down from
the earlier Mystics. It seems to have been a custom among these _Brethren
of the Common Lot_ to invite their neighbours to meet in their schoolrooms
or in a hall to listen to religious discourses. There they read and
expounded the New Testament in the vernacular. They also read extracts
from books written to convey popular religious instruction. They
questioned their audience to find out how far their hearers understood
their teaching, and endeavoured by question and answer to discover and
solve religious difficulties. These schools and teachers had extended all
over Germany by the close of the fifteenth century, and their effect in
quickening and keeping alive personal religion must have been great.
(_c_) Then, altogether apart from the social and semi-political propaganda
of the Hussites, there is evidence that ever since the circulation of the
encyclic letter addressed by the Taborites in November 1431 to all
Christians in all lands, and more especially since the foundation of the
_Unitas Fratrum_ in 1452, there had been constant communication between
Bohemia and the scattered bodies of evangelical dissenters throughout
Germany. Probably historians have credited the Hussites with more than
their due influence over their German sympathisers. The latter had arrived
at the conclusion that tithes ought to be looked upon as free-will
offerings, that the cup should be given to the laity, etc., long before
the movements under the leadership of Wiclif and of Huss. But the
knowledge that they had sympathisers and brethren beyond their own land
must have been a source of strength to the German nonconformists.
Our knowledge of the times is still too obscure to warrant us in making
very definite statements about the proportionate effect of these three
religious sources of influence on the small communities of _Brethren_ or
evangelical dissenters from the mediæval Church which maintained a
precarious existence at the close of the Middle Ages. There is one curious
fact, however, which shows that there must have been an intimate
connection between the Waldenses of Savoy and France, the _Brethren_ of
Germany, and the _Unitas Fratrum_ of Bohemia. They all used the same
catechism for the instruction of their children in divine things. So far
as can be ascertained, this small catechism was first printed in 1498, and
editions can be traced down to 1530. It exists in French, Italian, German,
and Bohemian. The inspiration drawn from the earlier Mystics and
_Gottesfreunde_ is shown by the books circulated by the _Brethren_. They
made great use of the newly discovered art of printing to spread abroad
small mystical writings on personal religion, and translations of portions
of the Holy Scriptures. They printed and circulated books which had been
used in manuscript among the Mystics of the fourteenth century, such as
the celebrated _Masterbook_, single sermons by Tauler, Prayers and Rules
for holy living extracted from his writings, as well as short tracts taken
from the later Mystics, like the _Explanation of the Ten Commandments_. It
is also probable that some of the many translations of the whole or
portions of the Bible which were in circulation in Germany before the days
of Luther came from these praying circles. The celebrated firm of Nürnberg
printers, the Koburgers, who published so many Bibles, were the German
printers of the little catechism used by the _Brethren_; and, as has been
said, the Anabaptists, who were the successors of these associations, did
not use Luther’s version, but a much older one which had come down to them
from their ancestors.
The members of these praying circles welcomed the Lutheran Reformation
when it came, but they can scarcely be said to have belonged to it. Luther
has confessed how much he owed to one of their publications, _Die deutsche
Theologie_; and what helped him must have benefited others. The
organisation of a Lutheran Church, based on civil divisions of the Empire,
gave the signal for a thorough reorganisation of the members of these old
associations who refused to have anything to do with a State Church. They
formed the best side of the very mixed and very much misunderstood
movement which later was called Anabaptism, and thus remained outside of
the two great divisions into which the Church of the Reformation
separated. This religious type existed and showed itself more especially
among the artisans in the larger towns of Germany.
It must not be supposed that these four classes of religious sentiment
which have been found existing during the later decades of the fifteenth
and the early decades of the sixteenth centuries can always be clearly
distinguished from each other. Religious types cannot be kept distinct,
but continually blend with each other in the most unexpected way. Humanism
and Anabaptism seem as far apart as they can possibly be; yet some of the
most noted Anabaptist leaders were distinguished members of the Erasmus
circle at Basel. Humanism and delicate clinging to the simple faith of
childhood blended in the exquisite character of Melanchthon. Luther,
_after_ his stern wrestle with self-righteousness in the convent at
Erfurt, believed that, had his parents been dead, he could have delivered
their souls from purgatory by his visits to the shrines of the saints at
Rome. The boy Mecum (Myconius) retained only so much of his father’s
teaching about the _free_ Grace of God that he believed an Indulgence from
Tetzel would benefit him if he could obtain it without paying for it.
There is everywhere and at all times a blending of separate types of
religious faith, until a notable crisis brings men suddenly face to face
with the necessity of a choice. Such a crisis occurred during the period
we call the Reformation, with the result that the leaders in that great
religious revival found that the truest theology after all was what had
expressed itself in hymns and prayers, in revivalist sermons and in
fireside teaching, and that they felt it to be their duty as theologians
to give articulate dogmatic expression to what their fathers had been
content to find inarticulately in the devotional rather than in the
intellectual sphere of the mediæval religious life.
Such was the religious atmosphere into which Luther was born, and which he
breathed from his earliest days. Every element seems to have shared in
creating and shaping his religious history, and had similar effects
doubtless on his most distinguished and sympathetic followers.
Chapter VI. Humanism And Reformation.(105)
§ 1. Savonarola.
When the Italian Humanism seemed about to become a mere revival of ancient
Paganism, with its accompaniments of a cynical sensualism on the one hand,
and the blindest trust in the occult sciences on the other, a great
preacher arose in Florence who recalled men to Christianity and to
Christian virtue.
Girolamo Savonarola was an Italian, a countryman of Giaocchino di Fiore,
of Arnold of Brescia, of Francis of Assisi, of John of Parma, and, like
them, he believed himself to be favoured with visions apocalyptic and
other. He belonged to a land over which, all down through the Middle Ages,
had swept popular religious revivals, sudden, consuming, and transient as
prairie fires. When a boy, he had quivered at seeing the pain in the world
around him; he had shuddered as he passed the great grim palaces of the
Italian despots, where the banqueting hall was separated from the dungeon
by a floor so thin that the groans of the prisoners mingled with the
tinkle of the silver dishes and the wanton conversation of the guests. He
had been destined by his family for the medical profession, and the lad
was set to master the writings of Thomas Aquinas and the Arabian
commentaries on Aristotle—the gateway in those days to a knowledge of the
art of healing. The _Summa_ of the great Schoolman entranced him, and
insensibly drew him towards theology; but outwardly he did not rebel
against the lot in life marked out for him. A glimpse of a quiet
resting-place in this world of pain and evil had come to him, but it
vanished, swallowed up in the universal gloom, when Roberto Strozzi
refused to permit him to marry his daughter Laodamia. There remained only
rest on God, study of His word, and such slight solace as music and
sonnet-writing could bring. His devotion to Thomas Aquinas impelled him to
seek within a Dominican convent that refuge which he passionately yearned
for, from a corrupt world and a corrupt Church. There he remained buried
for long years, reading and re-reading the Scriptures, poring over the
_Summa_, drinking in the New Learning, almost unconsciously creating for
himself a philosophy which blended the teachings of Aquinas with the
Neo-Platonism of Marsiglio Ficino and of the Academy, and planning how he
could best represent the doctrines of the Christian religion in harmony
with the natural reason of man.
When at last he became a great preacher, able to sway heart and
conscience, it should not be forgotten that he was mediæval to the core.
His doctrinal teaching was based firmly on the theology of Thomas Aquinas.
His intellectual conception of faith, his strong belief in the divine
predestination and his way of expressing it, his view of Scripture as
possessing manifold meanings, were all defined for him by the great
Dominican Schoolman. He held strongly the mediæval idea that the Church
was an external political unity, ruled by the Bishop of Rome, to whom
every human soul must be subject, and whom everyone must obey save only
when commands were issued contrary to a plain statement of the evangelical
law. He expounded the fulness of and the slight limitations to the
authority of the Pope exactly as Thomas and the great Schoolmen of the
thirteenth century had done, though in terms very different from the
canonists of the Roman Curia at the close of the Middle Ages. Even his
appreciation of the Neo-Platonist side of Humanism could be traced back to
mediæval authorities; for at all times the writings of the
pseudo-Dionysius had been a source of inspiration to the greater
Schoolmen.
His scholarship brought him into relation with the Humanist leaders in
Florence, the earnest tone of his teaching and the saintliness of his
character attracted them, his deep personal piety made them feel that he
possessed something which they lacked; while no Neo-Platonist could be
repelled by his claim to be the recipient of visions from on high.
The celebrated Humanists of Florence became the disciples of the great
preacher. Marsiglio Ficino himself, the head of the Florentine Academy,
who kept one lamp burning before the bust of Plato and another before an
image of the Virgin, was for a time completely under his spell. Young
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s whole inner life was changed through his
conversations with the Prior of San Marco. He reformed his earlier
careless habits. He burnt five books of wanton love-songs which he had
composed before his conversion.(106) He prayed daily at fixed hours, and
he wrote earnestly to his nephew on the importance of prayer for a godly
life:
“ ‘I stir thee not,’ he says, ‘to that prayer that standeth in
many words, but to that prayer which in the secret chamber of the
mind, in the privy-closet of the soul, with every affect speaketh
to God; which in the most lightsome darkness of contemplation not
only presenteth the mind to the Father, but also uniteth it with
Him by unspeakable ways which only they know who have assayed. Nor
care I how long or how short thy prayer be; but how effectual, how
ardent, and rather interrupted and broken between with sighs, than
drawn on length with a number of words.... Let no day pass but
thou once at the leastwise present thyself to God in prayer....
What thou shalt in thy prayer ask of God, both the Holy Spirit
which prayeth for us and also thine own necessity shall every hour
put in thy mind.’ ”(107)
He studied the writings of Thomas Aquinas, which contained the favourite
theology of Savonarola, and spoke of the great Schoolman as a “pillar of
truth.”(108) He handed over the third part of his estates to his nephew,
and lived plainly on what remained, that he might give largely in
charity.(109) He made Savonarola his almoner, who on his behalf gave alms
to destitute people and marriage portions to poor maidens.(110) He had
frequent thoughts of entering the Dominican Order, and
“On a time as he walked with his nephew, John Francis, in a garden
at Ferrara, talking of the love of Christ, he broke out with these
words: ‘Nephew,’ said he, ‘this will I show thee; I warn thee keep
it secret; the substance I have left after certain books of mine
are finished, I intend to give out to poor folk, and, fencing
myself with the crucifix, barefoot, walking about the world, in
every town and castle I purpose to preach Christ.’ ”(111)
It is also recorded that he made a practice of scourging himself;
especially “on those days which represent unto us the Passion and Death
that Christ suffered for our sake, he beat and scourged his own flesh in
remembrance of that great benefit, and for cleansing his old
offences.”(112) But above all things he devoted himself to a diligent
study of the Holy Scriptures, and commended the practice to his nephew:
“ ‘Thou mayest do nothing more pleasing to God, nothing more
profitable to thyself, than if thine hand cease not day and night
to turn and read the volumes of Holy Scripture. There lieth
privily in them a certain heavenly strength, quick and effectual,
which, with a marvellous power, transformeth and changeth the
readers’ mind into the love of God, if they be clean and lowly
entreated.’ ”(113)
The great Platonist forsook Plato for St. Paul, whom he called the
“glorious Apostle.”(114) When he died he left his lands to one of the
hospitals in Florence, and desired to be buried in the hood of the
Dominican monks and within the Convent of San Marco.
Another distinguished member of the Florentine Academy, Angelo Poliziano,
was also one of Savonarola’s converts. We find him exchanging confidences
with Pico, both declaring that love and not knowledge is the faculty by
which we learn to know God:
“ ‘But now behold, my well-beloved Angelo,’ writes Pico, ‘what
madness holdeth us. Love God (while we be in this body) we rather
may, than either know Him, or by speech utter Him. In loving Him
also we more profit ourselves; we labour less and serve Him more.
And yet had we rather always by knowledge never find that thing we
seek, than by love possess that thing which also without love were
in vain found.’ ”(115)
Poliziano, like Pico, had at one time some thoughts of joining the
Dominican Order. He too was buried at his own request in the cowl of the
Dominican monk in the Convent of San Marco.
Lorenzo de Medici, who during his life had made many attempts to win the
support of Savonarola, and had always been repulsed, could not die without
entreating the great preacher to visit him on his deathbed and grant him
absolution.
Italian Humanism was for the moment won over to Christianity by the Prior
of San Marco. Had the poets and the scholars, the politicians and the
ecclesiastics, the State and the Church, not been so hopelessly corrupt,
there might have been a great renovation of mankind, under the leadership
of men who had no desire to break the political unity of the mediæval
Church. For it can scarcely be too strongly insisted that Savonarola was
no Reformation leader in the more limited sense of the phrase. The
movement he headed has much more affinity with the crude revival of
religion in Germany in the end of the fifteenth century, than with the
Reformation itself; and the aim of the reorganisation of the Tuscan
congregation of the Dominicans under Savonarola has an almost exact
parallel in the creation of the congregation of the Augustinian Eremites
under Andreas Proles and Johann Staupitz. The whole Italian movement, as
might be expected, was conducted by men of greater intelligence and
refinement. It had therefore less sympathy than the German with
pilgrimages, relics, the niceties of ceremonial worship, and the cult of
the vulgarly miraculous; but it was not the less mediæval on these
accounts. It was the death rather than the life and lifework of Savonarola
that was destined to have direct effect on the Reformation soon to come
beyond the Alps; for his martyrdom was a crowning evidence of the
impossibility of reforming the Church of the Middle Ages apart from the
shock of a great convulsion. “Luther himself,” says Professor Villari,
“could scarcely have been so successful in inaugurating his Reform, had
not the sacrifice of Savonarola given a final proof that it was hopeless
to hope in the purification of Rome.”(116)
§ 2. John Colet.
While Savonarola was at the height of his influence in Florence, there
chanced to be in Italy a young Englishman, John Colet, son of a wealthy
London merchant who had been several times Lord Mayor. He had gone there,
we may presume, like his countrymen Grocyn and Linacre, to make himself
acquainted with the New Learning at its fountainhead. There is no proof
that he went to Florence or ever saw the great Italian preacher; but no
stranger could have visited Northern Italy in 1495 without hearing much of
him and of his work. Colet’s whole future life in England bears evidence
that he did receive a new impulse while he was in Italy, and that of such
a kind as could have come only from Savonarola. What Erasmus tells us of
his sojourn there amply confirms this. Colet gave himself up to the study
of the Holy Scriptures; he read carefully those theologians of the ancient
Church specially acceptable to the Neo-Platonist Christian Humanists; he
studied the pseudo-Dionysius, Origen, and Jerome. What is more remarkable
still in a foreign Humanist come to study in Italy, he read diligently
such English classics as he could find in order to prepare himself for the
work of preaching when he returned to England. The words of Erasmus imply
that the impulse to do all this came to him when he was in Italy, and
there was no one to impart it to him but the great Florentine.
When Colet returned to England in 1496, he began to lecture at Oxford on
the Epistles of St. Paul. His method of exposition, familiar enough after
Calvin had introduced it into the Reformed Church, was then absolutely
new, and proves that he was an original and independent thinker. His aim
was to find out the _personal_ message which the writer (St. Paul) had
sent to the Christians at Rome; and this led him to seek for every trace
which revealed the personality of the Apostle to the Gentiles. It was
equally imperative to know what were the surroundings of the men to whom
the Epistle was addressed, and Colet studied Suetonius to find some
indications of the environment of the Roman Christians. He had thus
completely freed himself from the Scholastic habit of using the Scriptures
as a mere collection of isolated texts to be employed in proving doctrines
or moral rules constructed or imposed by the Church, and it is therefore
not surprising to find that he never lards his expositions with quotations
from the Fathers. It is a still greater proof of his daring that he set
aside the allegorising methods of the Schoolmen,—methods abundantly used
by Savonarola,—and that he did so in spite of his devotion to the writings
of the pseudo-Dionysius. He was the first to apply the critical methods of
the New Learning to discover the exact meaning of the books of the Holy
Scriptures. His treatment of the Scriptures shows that however he may have
been influenced by Savonarola and by the Christian Humanists of Italy, he
had advanced far beyond them, and had seen, what no mediæval theologian
head been able to perceive, that the Bible is a personal and not a
dogmatic revelation. They were mediæval: he belongs to the Reformation
circle of thinkers. Luther, Calvin, and Colet, whatever else separates
them, have this one deeply important thought in common. Further, Colet
discarded the mediæval conception of a mechanical inspiration of the text
of Scripture, in this also agreeing with Luther and Calvin. The
inspiration of the Holy Scriptures was something mysterious to him. “The
Spirit seemed to him by reason of its majesty to have a peculiar method of
its own, singularly, absolutely free, blowing where it lists, making
prophets of whom it will, yet so that the spirit of the prophets is
subject to the prophets.”(117)
Colet saw clearly, and denounced the abounding evils which were ruining
the Church of his day. The Convocation of the English Church never
listened to a bolder sermon than that preached to them by the Dean of St.
Paul’s in 1512—the same year that Luther addressed an assembly of clergy
at Leitzkau. The two addresses should be compared. The same fundamental
thought is contained in both—that every true reformation must begin with
the individual man. Colet declared that reform must begin with the
bishops, and that once begun it would spread to the clergy and thence to
the laity; “for the body follows the soul; and as are the rulers in a
State, such will the people be.” He urged that what was wanted was the
enforcement of ecclesiastical laws which were already in existence.
Ignorant and wicked men were admitted to holy orders, and there were laws
prohibiting this. Simony was creeping “like a cancer through the minds of
priests, so that most are not ashamed in these days to get for themselves
great dignities by petitions and suits at court, rewards and promises”;
and yet strict laws against the evil were in existence. He proceeded to
enumerate the other flagrant abuses—the non-residence of clergy, the
worldly pursuits and indulgences of the clergy; the scandals and vices of
the ecclesiastical law-courts; the infrequency of provincial councils to
discuss and remedy existing evils; the wasting of the patrimony of the
Church on sumptuous buildings, on banquets, on enriching kinsfolk, or on
keeping hounds. The Church had laws against all these abuses, but they
were not enforced, and could not be until the bishops amended their ways.
His scheme of reform was to put in operation the existing regulations of
Canon Law. “The diseases which are now in the Church were the same in
former ages, and there is no evil for which the holy fathers did not
provide excellent remedies; there are no crimes in prohibition of which
there are not laws in the body of Canon Law.” Such was his definite idea
of reform in this famous Convocation sermon.
But he had wider views. He desired the diffusion of a sound Christian
education, and did the best that could be done by one man to promote it,
by spending his private fortune in founding St. Paul’s school, which he
characteristically left in charge of a body of laymen. He longed to see a
widespread preaching in the vernacular, and believed that the bishops
should show an example in this clerical duty. It is probable that he
wished the whole service to be in the vernacular, for it was made a charge
against him that he taught his congregation to repeat the Lord’s Prayer in
English. Besides, he had clearly grasped the thought, too often forgotten
by theologians of all schools, that the spiritual facts and forces which
lie at the roots of the Christian life are one thing, and the intellectual
conceptions which men make to explain these facts and forces are another,
and a much less important thing; that men are able to be Christians and to
live the Christian life because of the former and not because of the
latter. He saw that, while dogma has its place, it is at best the alliance
of an immortal with a mortal, the union between that which is unchangeably
divine and the fashions of human thought which change from one age to
another. For this reason he thought little of the Scholastic Theology of
his days, with its forty-three propositions about the nature of God and
its forty-five about the nature of man before and after the Fall, each of
which had to be assented to at the risk of a charge of heresy. “Why do you
extol to me such a man as Aquinas? If he had not been so very arrogant,
indeed, he would not surely so rashly and proudly have taken upon himself
to define all things. And unless his spirit had been somewhat worldly, he
would not surely have corrupted the whole teaching of Christ by mixing it
with his profane philosophy.” The Scholastic Theology might have been
scientific in the thirteenth century, but the “scientific” is the human
and changing element in dogma, and the old theology had become clearly
unscientific in the sixteenth. Therefore he was accustomed to advise young
theological students to keep to the Bible and the Apostles’ Creed, and let
divines, if they liked, dispute about the rest; and he taught Erasmus to
look askance at Luther’s reconstruction of the Augustinian theology.
But no thinking man, however he may flout at philosophy and dogma, can do
without either; and Colet was no exception to the general rule. He has
placed on record his detestation of Aquinas and his dislike of Augustine,
and we may perhaps see in this a lack of sympathy with a prominent
characteristic of the theology of Latin Christianity from Tertullian to
Aquinas and Occam, to say nothing of developments since the Reformation.
The great men who built up the Western Church were almost all trained
Roman lawyers. Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine, Gregory the Great (whose
writings form the bridge between the Latin Fathers and the Schoolmen) were
all men whose early training had been that of a Roman lawyer,—a training
which moulded and shaped all their thinking, whether theological or
ecclesiastical. They instinctively regarded all questions as a great Roman
lawyer would. They had the lawyer’s craving for exact definitions. They
had the lawyer’s idea that the primary duty laid upon them was to enforce
obedience to authority, whether that authority expressed itself in
external institutions or in the precise definitions of the correct ways of
thinking about spiritual truths. No branch of Western Christendom has been
able to free itself from the spell cast upon it by these Roman lawyers of
the early centuries of the Christian Church.
If the ideas of Christian Roman lawyers, filtering slowly down through the
centuries, had made the Bishops of Rome dream that they were the
successors of Augustus, at once Emperor and Pontifex Maximus, master of
the bodies and of the souls of mankind, they had also inspired the
theologians of the Mediæval Church with the conception of an intellectual
imperialism, where a system of Christian thought, expressed with legal
precision, could bind into a comprehensive unity the active intelligence
of mankind. Dogmas thus expressed can become the instruments of a tyranny
much more penetrating than that of an institution, and so Colet found. In
his revolt he turned from the Latins to the Greeks, and to that thinker
who was furthest removed from the legal precision of statement which was
characteristic of Western theology.
It is probable that his intercourse with the Christian Humanists of Italy,
and his introduction to Platonists and to Neo-Platonism, made him turn to
the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius; but it is certain that he believed
at first that the author of these quaint mystical tracts was the Dionysius
who was one of the converts of St. Paul at Athens, and that these writings
embodied much of the teaching of the Apostle to the Gentiles, and took the
reader back to the first generation of the Christian Church. After he had
learned from Grocyn that the author of the _Celestial_ and the
_Terrestrial Hierarchies_ could not have been the convert of St. Paul, and
that the writings could not be earlier than the sixth century, he still
regarded them as evidence of the way in which a Christian philosopher
could express the thoughts which were current in Christianity one thousand
years before Colet’s time. The writings could be used as a touchstone to
test usages and opinions prevalent at the close of the Middle Ages, when
men were still subject to the domination of the Scholastic Theology, and
as justification for rejecting them.
They taught him two things which he was very willing to learn: that the
human mind, however it may be able to feel after God, can never comprehend
Him, nor imprison His character and attributes in propositions—stereotyped
aspects of thoughts—which can be fitted into syllogisms; and that such
things as hierarchy and sacraments are to be prized not because they are
in themselves the active sources and centres of mysterious powers, but
because they faintly symbolise the spiritual forces by which God works for
the salvation of His people. Colet applied to the study of the writings of
the pseudo-Dionysius a mind saturated with simple Christian truth gained
from a study of the Holy Scriptures, and especially of the Epistles of St.
Paul; and the very luxuriance of imagination and bewildering confusion of
symbolism in these writings, their elusiveness as opposed to the precision
of Thomas Aquinas or of John Duns the Scot, enabled him the more easily to
find in them the germs of his own more definite opinions.
When one studies the abstracts of the _Hierarchies_(118)—which Colet wrote
out from memory—with the actual text of the books themselves, it is
scarcely surprising to find how much there is of Colet and how little of
Dionysius.(119)
While it is impossible to say how far Colet, and the Christian Humanists
who agreed with him, would have welcomed the principles of a Reformation
yet to come, it can be affirmed that he held the same views on two very
important points. He did not believe in a priesthood in the mediæval nor
in the modern Roman sense of the word, and his theory of the efficacy and
meaning of the sacraments of the Christian Church was essentially
Protestant.
According to Colet, there was no such thing as a mediatorial priesthood
whose essential function it was to approach God on men’s behalf and
present their offerings to Him. The duty of the Christian priesthood was
ministerial; it was to declare the love and mercy of God to their
fellow-men, and to strive for the purification, illumination, and
salvation of mankind by constant preaching of the truth and diffusion of
gospel light, even as Christ strove. He did not believe that priests had
received from God the power of absolving from sins. “It must be needfully
remarked,” he says, “lest bishops be presumptuous, that it is not the part
of men to loose the bonds of sins; nor does the power belong to them of
loosing or binding anything,”—the truth Luther set forth in his Theses
against Indulgences.
Colet is even more decided in his repudiation of the sacramental theories
of the mediæval Church. The Eucharist is not a sacrifice, but a
commemoration of the death of our Lord, and a symbol of the union and
communion which believers have with Him, and with their fellow-men through
Him. Baptism is a ceremony which symbolises the believer’s change of heart
and his vow of service to his Master, and signifies “the more excellent
baptism of the inner man”; and the duty of sponsors is to train children
in the knowledge and fear of God.(120)
We are told that the Lollards delighted in Colet’s preaching; that they
advised each other to go to hear him; and that attendance at the Dean’s
sermons was actually made a charge against them. Colet was no Lollard
himself; indeed, he seems to have once sat among ecclesiastical judges who
condemned Lollards to death;(121) but the preacher who taught that tithes
were voluntary offerings, who denounced the evil lives of the monks and
the secular clergy; who hated war, and did not scruple to say so; whose
sermons were full of simple Bible instruction, must have recalled many
memories of the old Lollard doctrines. For Lollardy had never died out in
England: it was active in Colet’s days, leavening the country for the
Reformation which was to come.
Nor should it be forgotten, in measuring the influence of Colet on the
coming Reformation, that Latimer was a friend of his, that William Tyndale
was one of his favourite pupils, and that he persuaded Erasmus to turn
from purely classical studies to edit the New Testament and the early
Christian Fathers.
§ 3. Erasmus.
Erasmus, as has often been said, was a “man by himself;” yet he may be
regarded as representing one, and perhaps the most frequent, type of
Christian Humanism. His character will always be matter of controversy;
and his motives may, without unfairness, be represented in an unfavourable
light,—a “great scholar but a petty-minded man,” is a verdict for which
there is abundant evidence. Such was the final judgment of his
contemporaries, mainly because he refused to take a definite side in the
age when the greatest controversy which has convulsed Western Europe since
the downfall of the old Empire seemed to call on every man to range
himself with one party or other. Our modern judgment must rest on a
different basis. In calmer days, when the din of battle has almost died
away, it is possible to recognise that to refuse to be a partisan _may_
indicate greatness instead of littleness of soul, a keener vision, and a
calmer courage. We cannot judge the man as hastily as his contemporaries
did. Still there is evidence enough and to spare to back their verdict.
Every biographer has admitted that it is hopeless to look for truth in his
voluminous correspondence. His feelings, hopes, intentions, and actual
circumstances are described to different correspondents at the same time
in utterly different ways. He was always writing for effect, and often for
effect of a rather sordid kind. He seldom gave a definite opinion on any
important question without attempting to qualify it in such a manner that
he might be able, if need arose, to deny that he had given it. No man knew
better how to use “if” and “but” so as to shelter himself from all
responsibility. He had the ingenuity of the cuttle-fish to conceal himself
and his real opinions, and it was commonly used to protect his own skin.
All this may be admitted; it can scarcely be denied.
Yet from his first visit to England (1498) down to his practical refusal
of a Cardinal’s Hat from Pope Adrian VI., on condition that he would
reside at Rome and assist in fighting the Reformation, Erasmus had his own
conception of what a reformation of Christianity really meant, and what
share in it it was possible for him to take. It must be admitted that he
held to this idea and kept to the path he had marked out for himself with
a tenacity of purpose which did him honour. It was by no means always that
of personal safety, still less the road to personal aggrandisement. It led
him in the end where he had never expected to stand. It made him a man
despised by both sides in the great controversy; it left him absolutely
alone, friendless, and without influence. He frequently used very
contemptible means to ward off attempts to make him diverge to the right
or left; he abandoned many of his earlier principles, or so modified them
that they were no longer recognisable. But he was always true to his own
idea of a reformation and of his life-work as a reformer.
Erasmus was firmly convinced that Christianity was above all things
something practical. It had to do with the ordinary life of mankind. It
meant love, humility, purity, reverence,—every virtue which the Saviour
had made manifest in His life on earth. This early “Christian philosophy”
had been buried out of sight under a Scholastic Theology full of
sophistical subtleties, and had been lost in the mingled Judaism and
Paganism of the popular religious life, with its weary ceremonies and
barbarous usages. A true reformation, he believed, was the moral
renovation of mankind, and the one need of the age was to return to that
earlier purer religion based on a real inward reverence for and imitation
of Christ. The man of letters, like himself, he conceived could play the
part of a reformer, and that manfully, in two ways. He could try, by the
use of wit and satire, to make contemptible the follies of the Schoolmen
and the vulgar travesty of religion which was in vogue among the people.
He could also bring before the eyes of all men that earlier and purer
religion which was true Christianity. He could edit the New Testament, and
enable men to read the very words which Jesus spoke and Paul preached,
make them see the deeds of Jesus and hear the apostolic explanations of
their meaning. He could say:
“Only be teachable, and you have already made much way in this
(the Christian) Philosophy. It supplies a spirit for a teacher,
imparted to none more readily than to the simple-minded. Other
philosophies, by the very difficulty of their precepts, are
removed out of the range of most minds. No age, no sex, no
condition of life is excluded from this. The sun itself is not
more common and open to all than the teaching of Christ. For I
utterly dissent from those who are unwilling that the Sacred
Scriptures should be read by the unlearned translated into their
vulgar tongue, as though Christ had taught such subtleties that
they can scarcely be understood even by a few theologians, or as
though the strength of the Christian religion consisted in men’s
ignorance of it. The mysteries of kings it may be safer to
conceal, but Christ wished His mysteries to be published as openly
as possible. I wish that even the weakest woman should read the
Gospel—should read the Epistles of Paul. And I wish these were
translated into all languages, so that they might be read and
understood, not only by Scots and Irishmen, but also by Turks and
Saracens. To make them understood is surely the first step. It may
be that they might be ridiculed by many, but some would take them
to heart. I long that the husbandman should sing portions of them
to himself as he follows the plough, that the weaver should hum
them to the tune of his shuttle, that the traveller should beguile
with their stories the tedium of his journey.”(122)
The scholar who became a reformer could further make plain, by editing and
publishing the writings of the earlier Christian Fathers, what the oldest
Christian Theology had been before the Schoolmen spoiled it.
The conception that a reformation of Christianity was mainly a renovation
of morals, enabled the Christian Humanist to keep true to the Renaissance
idea that the writers of classical antiquity were to be used to aid the
work of ameliorating the lot of mankind. The Florentine circle spoke of
the inspiration of Homer, of Plato, and of Cicero, and saw them labouring
as our Lord had done to teach men how to live better lives. Pico and
Reuchlin had gone further afield, and had found illuminating anticipations
of Christianity, in this sense and in others, among the Hebrews, the
Egyptians, and perhaps the Brahmins. Erasmus was too clear-sighted to be
drawn into any alliance with Oriental mysticism or cabalistic
speculations; but he insisted on the aid which would come from the
Christian reformer making full use of the ethical teaching of the wise men
of Greece and Rome in his attempt to produce a moral renovation in the
lives of his fellows. Socrates and Cicero, each in his own day and within
his own sphere, had striven for the same moral renovation that
Christianity promised, and, in this sense at least, might be called
Christians before Christ. So persuaded was Erasmus of their affinity with
the true spirit of Christianity, that he declared that Cicero had as much
right to a high place in heaven as many a Christian saint, and that when
he thought of the Athenian martyr he could scarcely refrain from saying,
_Sancte Socrates, Ora pro nobis_.
It must be remembered also that Erasmus had a genuine and noble horror of
war, which was by no means the mere shrinking of a man whose nerves were
always quivering. He preached peace as boldly and in as disinterested a
fashion as did his friend John Colet. He could not bear the thought of a
religious war. This must not be forgotten in any estimate of his conduct
and of his relation to the Reformation. No man, not even Luther, scattered
the seeds of revolution with a more reckless hand, and yet a thorough and
steadfast dislike to all movements which could be called revolutionary was
one of the most abiding elements in his character. He hated what he called
the “tumult.” He had an honest belief that all public evils in State and
Church must be endured until they dissolve away quietly under the
influence of sarcasm and common sense, or until they are removed by the
action of the responsible authorities. He was clear-sighted enough to see
that an open and avowed attack on the papal supremacy, or on any of the
more cherished doctrines and usages of the mediæval Church, must end in
strife and in bloodshed, and he therefore honestly believed that no such
attack ought to be made.
When all these things are kept in view, it is possible to see what
conception Erasmus had about his work as a reformer, with its
possibilities and its limitations. He adhered to it tenaciously all his
life. He held it in the days of his earlier comparative obscurity. He
maintained it when he had been enthroned as the prince of the realm of
learning. He clung to it in his discredited old age. No one can justify
the means he sometimes took to prevent being drawn from the path he had
marked out for himself; but there is something to be said for the man who,
through good report and evil, stuck resolutely to his view of what a
reformation ought to be, and what were the functions of a man of letters
who felt himself called to be a reformer. Had Luther been gifted with that
keen sense of prevision with which Erasmus was so fatally endowed, would
he have stood forward to attack Indulgences in the way he did? It is
probable that it would have made no difference in his action; but he did
not think so himself. He said once, “No good work comes about by our own
wisdom; it begins in dire necessity. I was forced into mine; but had I
known then what I know now, ten wild horses would not have drawn me into
it.” The man who leads a great movement of reform may see the distant, but
has seldom a clear vision of the nearer future. He is one who feels the
slow pressure of an imperious spiritual power, who is content with one
step at a time, and who does not ask to see the whole path stretching out
before him.
Erasmus lost both his parents while he was a child, and never enjoyed the
advantages of a home training. He was driven by deceit or by
self-deception into a monastery when he was a lad. He escaped from the
clutches of the monastic life when he was twenty years of age, broken in
health, and having learned to know human nature on its bad side and to
trade on that knowledge. He was one of the loneliest of mortals, and
trusted in no one but himself. With one great exception, he had no
friendship which left an enduring influence on his character. From
childhood he taught himself in his own way; when he grew to manhood he
planned and schemed for himself; he steadfastly refused to be drawn into
any kind of work which he did not like for its own sake; he persistently
shunned every entanglement which might have controlled his action or
weighted him with any responsibility. He stands almost alone among the
Humanists in this. All the others were officials, or professors, or
private teachers, or jurists, or ecclesiastics. Erasmus was nothing, and
would be nothing, but a simple man of letters.
Holbein has painted him so often that his features are familiar. Every
line of the clearly cut face suggests demure sarcasm—the thin lips closely
pressed together, the half-closed eyelids, and the keen glance of the
scarcely seen blue eyes. The head is intellectual, but there is nothing
masculine about the portrait—nothing suggesting the massiveness of the
learned burgher Pirkheimer; or the jovial strength of the Humanist
_landsknecht_ Eobanus Hessus; or the lean wolf-like tenacity of Hutten,
the descendant of robber-knights; or the steadfast homely courage of
Martin Luther. The dainty hands, which Holbein drew so often, and the
general primness of his appearance, suggest a descent from a long line of
maiden aunts. The keen intelligence was enclosed in a sickly body, whose
frailty made continuous demands on the soul it imprisoned. It needed warm
rooms with stoves that sent forth no smell, the best wines, an easy-going
horse, and a deft servant; and to procure all these comforts Erasmus wrote
the sturdiest of begging letters and stooped to all kinds of flatteries.
The visit which Erasmus paid to England in 1498 was the turning-point in
his life. He found himself, for the first time, among men who were his
equals in learning and his superiors in many things. “When I listen to my
friend Colet,” he says, “it seems to me like listening to Plato himself.
Who does not marvel at the complete mastery of the sciences in Grocyn?
What could be keener, more profound, and more searching than the judgment
of Linacre? Has Nature ever made a more gentle, a sweeter, or a happier
disposition than Thomas More’s?” He made the acquaintance of men as full
of the New Learning as he was himself, who hated the Scotist theology more
bitterly than he did, and who nevertheless believed in a pure, simple
Christian philosophy, and were earnest Christians. They urged him to join
them in their work, and we can trace in the correspondence of Erasmus the
growing influence of Colet. The Dean of St. Paul’s made Erasmus the
decidedly Christian Humanist he became, and impressed on him that
conception of a reformation which, leaving external things very much as
they were, undertook a renovation of morals. He never lost the impress of
Colet’s stamp.
It would appear from one of Erasmus’ letters that Colet urged him to write
commentaries on some portions of the New Testament; but Erasmus would only
work in his own way; and it is probable that his thoughts were soon turned
to preparing an edition of the New Testament in Greek. The task was long
brooded over; and he had to perfect himself in his knowledge of the
language.
This determination to undertake no work for which he was not supremely
fitted, together with his powers of application and acquisition, gave
Erasmus the reputation of being a strong man. He was seen to be unlike any
other Humanist, whether Italian or German. He had no desire merely to
reproduce the antique, or to confine himself within the narrow circle in
which the “Poets” of the Renaissance worked. He put ancient culture to
modern uses. Erasmus was no arm-chair student. He was one of the keenest
observers of everything human—the Lucian or the Voltaire of the sixteenth
century. From under his half-closed eyelids his quick glance seized and
retained the salient characteristics of all sorts and conditions of men
and women. He described theologians, jurists and philosophers, monks and
parish priests, merchants and soldiers, husbands and wives, women good and
bad, dancers and diners, pilgrims, pardon-sellers, and keepers of relics;
the peasant in the field, the artisan in the workshop, and the vagrant on
the highway. He had studied all, and could describe them with a few deft
phrases, as incisive as Dürer’s strokes, with an almost perfect style, and
with easy sarcasm.
This application of the New Learning to portray the common life, combined
with his profound learning, made Erasmus the idol of the young German
Humanists. They said that he was more than mortal, that his judgment was
infallible, and that his work was perfect. They made pilgrimages to visit
him. An interview was an event to be talked about for years; a letter, a
precious treasure to be bequeathed as an heirloom. Some men refused to
render the universal homage accorded by scholars and statesmen, by princes
lay and clerical. Luther scented Pelagian theology in his annotations; he
scorned Erasmus’ wilful playing with truth; he said that the great
Humanist was a mocker who poured ridicule upon everything, even on Christ
and religion. There was some ground for the charge. His sarcasm was not
confined to his _Praise of Folly_ or to his _Colloquies_. It appears in
almost everything that he wrote—even in his Paraphrases of the New
Testament.
That such a man should have felt himself called upon to be a reformer,
that this Saul should have appeared among the prophets, is in itself
testimony that he lived during a great religious crisis, and that the
religious question was the most important one in his days.
The principal literary works of Erasmus meant to serve the reformation he
desired to see are:—two small books, _Enchiridion militis christiani_ (_A
Handbook of the Christian Soldier_, or _A Pocket Dagger for the Christian
Soldier_—it may be translated either way), first printed in 1503, and
_Institutio Principis Christiani_ (1518); his _Encomium Moriæ_ (_Praise of
Folly_, 1511); his edition of the _New Testament_, or _Novum Instrumentum_
(1516), with prefaces and paraphrases; and perhaps many of the dialogues
in his _Colloquia_ (1519).
Erasmus himself explains that in the _Enchiridion_ he wrote to counteract
the vulgar error of those who think that religion consists in ceremonies
and in more than Jewish observances, while they neglect what really
belongs to piety. The whole aim of the book is to assert the individual
responsibility of man to God apart from any intermediate human agency.
Erasmus ignores as completely as Luther would have done the whole mediæval
thought of the mediatorial function of the Church and its priestly order.
In this respect the book is essentially Protestant and thoroughly
revolutionary. It asserts in so many words that much of the popular
religion is pure paganism:
“One worships a certain Rochus, and why? because he fancies he
will drive away the plague from his body. Another mumbles prayers
to Barbara or George, lest he fall into the hands of his enemy.
This man fasts to Apollonia to prevent the toothache. That one
gazes upon an image of the divine Job, that he may be free from
the itch.... In short, whatever our fears and our desires, we set
so many gods over them, and these are different in different
nations.... This is not far removed from the superstition of those
who used to vow tithes to Hercules in order to get rich, or a cock
to Æsculapius to recover from an illness, or who slew a bull to
Neptune for a favourable voyage. The names are changed, but the
object is the same.”(123)
In speaking of the monastic life, he says:
“ ‘Love,’ says Paul, ‘is to edify your neighbour,’ ... and if this
only were done, nothing could be more joyous or more easy than the
life of the ‘religious’; but now this life seems gloomy, full of
Jewish superstitions, not in any way free from the vices of laymen
and in some ways more corrupt. If Augustine, whom they boast of as
the founder of their order, came to life again, he would not
recognise them; he would exclaim that he had never approved of
this sort of life, but had organised a way of living according to
the rule of the Apostles, not according to the superstition of the
Jews.”(124)
The more one studies the _Praise of Folly_, the more evident it becomes
that Erasmus did not intend to write a satire on human weakness in
general: the book is the most severe attack on the mediæval Church that
had, up to that time, been made; and it was meant to be so. The author
wanders from his main theme occasionally, but always to return to the
insane follies of the religious life sanctioned by the highest authorities
of the mediæval Church. Popes, bishops, theologians, monks, and the
ordinary lay Christians, are all unmitigated fools in their ordinary
religious life. The style is vivid, the author has seen what he describes,
and he makes his readers see it also. He writes with a mixture of light
mockery and bitter earnestness. He exposes the foolish questions of the
theologians; the vices and temporal ambitions of the Popes, bishops, and
monks; the stupid trust in festivals, pilgrimages, indulgences, and
relics. The theologians, the author says, are rather dangerous people to
attack, for they come down on one with their six hundred conclusions and
command him to recant, and if he does not they declare him a heretic
forthwith. The problems which interest them are:
“Whether there was any instant of time in the divine generation?
... Could God have taken the form of a woman, a devil, an ass, a
gourd, or a stone? How the gourd could have preached, wrought
miracles, hung on the cross?”(125)
He jeers at the Popes and higher ecclesiastics:
“Those supreme Pontiffs who stand in the place of Christ, if they
should try to imitate His life, that is, His poverty, His toil,
His teaching, His cross, and His scorn of this world ... what
could be more dreadful!... We ought not to forget that such a mass
of scribes, copyists, notaries, advocates, secretaries,
mule-drivers, grooms, money-changers, procurers, and gayer persons
yet I might mention, did I not respect your ears,—that this whole
swarm which now burdens—I beg your pardon, honours—the Roman See
would be driven to starvation.”(126)
As for the monks:
“The greater part of them have such faith in their ceremonies and
human traditions, that they think one heaven is not reward enough
for such great doings.... One will show his belly stuffed with
every kind of fish; another will pour out a hundred bushels of
psalms; another will count up myriads of fasts, and make up for
them all again by almost bursting himself at a single dinner.
Another will bring forward such a heap of ceremonies that seven
ships would hardly hold them; another boast that for sixty years
he has never touched a penny except with double gloves on his
hands.... But Christ will interrupt their endless bragging, and
will demand—‘Whence this new kind of Judaism?’
“They do all things by rule, by a kind of sacred mathematics; as,
for instance, how many knots their shoes must be tied with, of
what colour everything must be, what variety in their garb, of
what material, how many straws’-breadth to their girdle, of what
form and of how many bushels’ capacity their cowl, how many
fingers broad their hair, and how many hours they sleep....”(127)
He ridicules men who go running about to Rome, Compostella, or Jerusalem,
wasting on long and dangerous journeys money which might be better spent
in feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. He scoffs at those who buy
Indulgences, who sweetly flatter themselves with counterfeit pardons, and
who have measured off the duration of Purgatory without error, as if by a
water-clock, into ages, years, months, and days, like the multiplication
table.(128) Is it religion to believe that if any one pays a penny out of
what he has stolen, he can have the whole slough of his life cleaned out
at once, and all his perjuries, lusts, drunkennesses, all his quarrels,
murders, cheats, treacheries, falsehoods, bought off in such a way that he
may begin over again with a new circle of crimes? The reverence for relics
was perhaps never so cruelly satirised as in the Colloquy, _Peregrinatio
Religionis Ergo_.
It must be remembered that this bitter satire was written some years
before Luther began the Reformation by an attack on Indulgences. It may
seem surprising how much liberty the satirist allowed himself, and how
much was permitted to him. But Erasmus knew very well how to protect
himself. He was very careful to make no definite attack, and to make no
mention of names. He was always ready to explain that he did not mean to
attack the Papacy, but only bad Popes; that he had the highest respect for
the monastic life, and only satirised evil-minded monks; or that he
reverenced the saints, but thought that reverence ought to be shown by
imitating them in their lives of piety. He could say all this with perfect
truth. Indeed, it is likely that with all his scorn against the monks,
Erasmus, in his heart, believed that a devout Capuchin or Franciscan monk
lived the ideal Christian life. He seems to say so in his Colloquy,
_Militis et Carthusiani_. He wrote, moreover, before the dignitaries of
the mediæval Church had begun to take alarm. Liberal Churchmen who were
the patrons of the New Learning had no objection to see the vices of the
times and the Church life of the day satirised by one who wrote such
exquisite latinity. In all his more serious work Erasmus was careful to
shelter himself under the protection of great ecclesiastics.
Erasmus was not the only scholar who had proposed to publish a correct
edition of the Holy Scriptures. The great Spaniard, Cardinal Ximenes, had
announced that he meant to bring out an edition of the Holy Scriptures in
which the text of the Vulgate would appear in parallel columns along with
the Hebrew and the Greek. The prospectus of this Complutensian Polyglot
was issued as early as 1502; the work was finished in 1517, and was
published in Spain in 1520 and in other lands in 1522. Erasmus was careful
to dedicate the first edition of his _Novum Instrumentum_, (1516) to Pope
Leo X., who graciously received it. He sent the second edition to the same
Pope in 1519, accompanied by a letter in which he says:
“I have striven with all my might to kindle men from those
chilling argumentations in which they had been so long frozen up,
to a zeal for theology which should be at once more pure and more
serious. And that this labour has so far not been in vain I
perceive from this, that certain persons are furious against me,
who cannot value anything they are unable to teach and are ashamed
to learn. But, trusting to Christ as my witness, whom my writings
above all would guard, to the judgment of your Holiness, to my own
sense of right and the approval of so many distinguished men, I
have always disregarded the yelpings of these people. Whatever
little talent I have, it has been, once for all, dedicated to
Christ: it shall serve His glory alone; it shall serve the Roman
Church, the prince of that Church, but especially your Holiness,
to whom I owe more than my whole duty.”
He dedicated the various parts of the _Paraphrases_ of the New Testament
to Cardinal Campeggio, to Cardinal Wolsey, to Henry VIII., to Charles V.,
and to Francis I. of France. He deliberately placed himself under the
protection of those princes, ecclesiastical and secular, who could not be
suspected of having any revolutionary designs against the existing state
of things in Church or in State.
In all this he was followed for the time being by the most distinguished
Christian Humanists in England, France, and Germany. They were full of the
brightest hopes. A Humanist Pope sat on the throne of St. Peter, young
Humanist kings ruled France and England, the Emperor Maximilian had long
been the patron of German Humanism, and much was expected from his
grandson Charles, the young King of Spain. Erasmus, the acknowledged
prince of Christian learning, was enthusiastically supported by Colet and
More in England, by Buddæus and Lefèvre in France, by Johann Staupitz,
Cochlæus, Thomas Murner, Jerome Emser, Conrad Mutianus, and George
Spalatin in Germany. They all believed that the golden age was
approaching, when the secular princes would forbid wars, and the
ecclesiastical lay aside their rapacity, and when both would lead the
peoples of Europe in a reformation of morals and in a re-establishment of
pure religion. Their hopes were high that all would be effected without
the “tumult” which they all dreaded, and when the storm burst, many of
them became bitter opponents of Luther and his action. Luther found no
deadlier enemies than Thomas Murner and Jerome Emser. Others, like George
Spalatin, became his warmest supporters. Erasmus maintained to the end his
attitude of cautious neutrality. In a long letter to Marlianus, Bishop of
Tuy in Spain, he says that he does not like Luther’s writings, that he
feared from the first that they would create a “tumult,” but that he dare
not altogether oppose the reformer, “because he feared that he might be
fighting against God.” The utmost that he could be brought to do after the
strongest persuasions, was to attack Luther’s Augustinian theology in his
_De Libero Arbitrio_, and to insinuate a defence of the principle of
ecclesiastical authority in the interpretation of Scripture, and a proof
that Luther had laid too much stress on the element of “grace” in human
actions. He turned away from the whole movement as far as he possibly
could, protesting that for himself he would ever cling to the Roman See.
The last years of his life were spent in excessive literary work—in
editing the earlier Christian Fathers; he completed his edition of Origen
in 1536, the year of his death. He settled at Louvain, and found it too
hotly theological for his comfort; went to Basel; wandered off to
Freiburg; then went back to Basel to die. After his death he was compelled
to take the side he had so long shrunk from. Pope Paul IV. classed him as
a notorious heretic, and placed on the first papal “Index” “all his
commentaries, notes, scholia, dialogues, letters, translations, books, and
writings, even when they contain nothing against religion or about
religion.”
We look in vain for any indication that those Christian Humanists
perceived that they were actually living in a time of revolution, and were
really standing on the edge of a crater which was about to change European
history by its eruption. Sir Thomas More’s instincts of religious life
were all mediæval. Colet had persuaded him to abandon his earlier impulse
to enter a monastic order, but More wore a hair shirt next his skin till
the day of his death. Yet in his sketch of an ideal commonwealth, he
expanded St. Paul’s thought of the equality of all men before Christ into
the conception that no man was to be asked to work more than six hours a
day, and showed that religious freedom could only flourish where there was
nothing in the form of the mediæval Church. The lovable and pious young
Englishman never imagined that his academic dream would be translated into
rude practical thoughts and ruder actions by leaders of peasant and
artisan insurgents, and that his _Utopia_ (1515), within ten years after
its publication, and ten years before his own death (1535), would furnish
texts for communist sermons, preached in obscure public-houses or to
excited audiences on village greens. The satirical criticisms of the
hierarchy, the monastic orders, and the popular religious life, which
Erasmus flung broadcast so recklessly in his lighter and more serious
writings, furnished the weapons for the leaders in that “tumult” which he
had dreaded all his days; and when he complained that few seemed to care
for the picture of a truly pious life, given in his _Enchiridion_, he did
not foresee that it would become a wonderfully popular book among those
who renounced all connection with the See of Rome to which the author had
promised a life-long obedience. The Christian Humanists, one and all, were
strangely blind to the signs of the times in which they lived.
No one can fail to appreciate the nobility of the purpose to work for a
great moral renovation of mankind which the Christian Humanists ever kept
before them, or refuse to see that they were always and everywhere
preachers of righteousness. When we remember the century and a half of
wars, so largely excited by ecclesiastical motives, which desolated Europe
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, few can withhold their
sympathy from the Christian Humanist idea that the path of reformation lay
through a great readjustment of the existing conditions of the religious
life, rather than through ecclesiastical revolution to a thorough-going
reconstruction; although we may sadly recognise that the dynastic
struggles of secular princes, the rapacity and religious impotence of
Popes and ecclesiastical authorities, and the imperious pressure of social
and industrial discontent, made the path of peace impossible. But what
must fill us with surprise is that the Christian Humanists seemed to
believe with a childlike innocence that the constituted authorities,
secular and ecclesiastical, would lead the way in this peaceful reform,
mainly because they were tinged with Humanist culture, and were the
patrons of artists and men of learning. Humanism meant to Pope Leo X. and
to the young Archbishop of Mainz additional sources of enjoyment,
represented by costly pictures, collections of MSS., and rare books, the
gratification of their taste for jewels and cameos, to say nothing of less
harmless indulgences, and the adulation of the circle of scholars whom
they had attracted to their courts; and it meant little more to the
younger secular princes.
It is also to be feared that the Christian Humanists had no real sense of
what was needed for that renovation of morals, public and private, which
they ardently desired to see. Pictures of a Christian life lived according
to the principles of reason, sharp polemic against the hierarchy, and
biting mockery of the stupidity of the popular religion, did not help the
masses of the people. The multitude in those early decades of the
sixteenth century were scourged by constant visitations of the plague and
other new and strange diseases, and they lived in perpetual dread of a
Turkish invasion. The fear of death and the judgment thereafter was always
before their eyes. What they wanted was a sense of God’s forgiveness for
their sins, and they greedily seized on Indulgences, pilgrimages to holy
places, and relic-worship to secure the pardon they longed for. The
aristocratic and intellectual reform, contemplated by the Christian
Humanists, scarcely appealed to them. Their longing for a certainty of
salvation could not be satisfied with recommendations to virtuous living
according to the rules of Neo-Platonic ethics. It is pathetic to listen to
the appeals made to Erasmus for something more than he could ever give:
“ ‘Oh! Erasmus of Rotterdam, where art thou?’ said Albert Dürer.
‘See what the unjust tyranny of earthly power, the power of
darkness, can do. Hear, thou knight of Christ! Ride forth by the
side of the Lord Christ; defend the truth, gain the martyr’s
crown! As it is, thou art but an old man. I have heard thee say
that thou hast given thyself but a couple more years of active
service; spend them, I pray, to the profit of the gospel and the
true Christian faith, and believe me the gates of Hell, the See of
Rome, as Christ has said, will not prevail against thee.’ ”(129)
The Reformation needed a man who had himself felt that commanding need of
pardon which was sending his fellows travelling from shrine to shrine, who
could tell them in plain homely words, which the common man could
understand, how each one of them could win that pardon for himself, who
could deliver them from the fear of the priest, and show them the way to
the peace of God. The Reformation needed Luther.
BOOK II. THE REFORMATION.
Chapter I. Luther to the Beginning of the Controversy About
Indulgences.(130)
§ 1. Why Luther was successful as the Leader in a Reformation.
Reformation had been attempted in various ways. Learned ecclesiastical
Jurists had sought to bring it about in the fifteenth century by what was
called _Conciliar Reform_. The sincerity and ability of the leaders of the
movement are unquestioned; but they had failed ignominiously, and the
Papacy with all its abuses had never been so powerful ecclesiastically as
when its superior diplomacy had vanquished the endeavour to hold it in
tutelage to a council.
The Christian Humanists had made their attempt—preaching a moral
renovation and the application of the existing laws of the Church to
punish ecclesiastical wrong-doers. Colet eloquently assured the Anglican
Convocation that the Church possessed laws which, if only enforced,
contained provisions ample enough to curb and master the ills which all
felt to be rampant. Erasmus had held up to scorn the debased religious
life of the times, and had denounced its Judaism and Paganism. Both were
men of scholarship and genius; but they had never been able to move
society to its depths, and awaken a new religious life, which was the one
thing needful.
History knows nothing of revivals of moral living apart from some new
religious impulse. The motive power needed has always come through leaders
who have had communion with the unseen. Humanism had supplied a
superfluity of teachers; the times needed a prophet. They received one; a
man of the people; bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh; one who
had himself lived that popular religious life with all the thoroughness of
a strong, earnest nature, who had sounded all its depths and tested its
capacities, and gained in the end no relief for his burdened conscience;
who had at last found his way into the presence of God, and who knew, by
his own personal experience, that the living God was accessible to every
Christian. He had won the freedom of a Christian man, and had reached
through faith a joy in living far deeper than that which Humanism boasted.
He became a leader of men, because his joyous faith made him a hero by
delivering him from all fear of Church or of clergy—the fear which had
weighed down the consciences of men for generations. Men could _see_ what
faith was when they looked at Luther.
It must never be forgotten that to his contemporaries Luther was the
embodiment of personal piety. All spoke of his sensitiveness to religious
impressions of all kinds in his early years. While he was inside the
convent, whether before or after he had found deliverance for his troubles
of soul, his fellows regarded him as a model of piety. In later days, when
he stood forth as a Reformer, he became such a power in the hearts of men
of all sorts and ranks, because he was seen to be a thoroughly pious man.
Albert Dürer may be taken as a type. In the great painter’s diary of the
journey he made with his wife and her maid Susanna to the Netherlands
(1520),—a mere summary of the places he visited and the persons he saw, of
what he paid for food and lodging and travel, of the prices he got for his
pictures, and what he paid for his purchases, literary and artistic,—he
tells how he heard of Luther’s condemnation at Worms, of the Reformer’s
disappearance, of his supposed murder by Popish emissaries (for so the
report went through Germany), and the news compelled him to that pouring
forth of prayers, of exclamations, of fervent appeals, and of bitter
regrets, which fills three out of the whole forty-six pages. The Luther he
almost worships is the “pious man,” the “follower of the Lord and of the
true Christian faith,” the “man enlightened by the Holy Spirit,” the man
who had been done to death by the Pope and the priests of his day, as the
Son of God had been murdered by the priests of Jerusalem. The one thing
which fills the great painter’s mind is the personal religious life of the
man Martin Luther.(131)
Another source of Luther’s power was that he had been led step by step,
and that his countrymen could follow him deliberately without being
startled by any too sudden changes. He was one of themselves; he took them
into his confidence at every stage of his public career; they knew him
thoroughly. He had been a monk, and that was natural for a youth of his
exemplary piety. He had lived a model monastic life; his companions and
his superiors were unwearied in commending him. He had spoken openly what
almost all good men had been feeling privately about Indulgences in plain
language which all could understand; and he had gradually taught himself
and his countrymen, who were following his career breathlessly, that the
man who trusted in God did not need to fear the censures of Pope or of the
clergy. He emancipated not merely the learned and cultivated classes, but
the common people, from the fear of the Church; and this was the one thing
needful for a true reformation. So long as the people of Europe believed
that the priesthood had some mysterious powers, no matter how vague or
indefinite, over the spiritual and eternal welfare of men and women,
freedom of conscience and a renovation of the public and private moral
life was impossible. The spiritual world will always have its anxieties
and terrors for every Christian soul, and the greatest achievement of
Luther was that by teaching and, above all, by example, he showed the
common man that he was in God’s hands, and not dependent on the blessing
or banning of a clerical caste. For Luther’s doctrine of Justification by
Faith, as he himself showed in his tract on the _Liberty of a Christian
Man_ (1520), was simply that there was nothing in the indefinite claim
which the mediæval Church had always made. From the moment the common
people, simple men and women, knew and felt this, they were freed from the
mysterious dread of Church and priesthood; they could look the clergy
fairly in the face, and could care little for their threats. It was
because Luther had freed himself from this dread, because the people, who
knew him to be a deeply pious man, saw that he was free from it, and
therefore that they need be in no concern about it, that he became the
great reformer and the popular leader in an age which was compelled to
revise its thoughts about spiritual things.
Hence it is that we may say without exaggeration that the Reformation was
embodied in Martin Luther, that it lived in him as in no one else, and
that its inner religious history may be best studied in the record of his
spiritual experiences and in the growth of his religious convictions.
§ 2. Luther’s Youth and Education.
Martin Luther was born in 1483 (Nov. 10th) at Eisleben, and spent his
childhood in the small mining town of Mansfeld. His father, Hans Luther,
had belonged to Möhra (Moortown), a small peasant township lying in the
north-east corner of the Thuringian Wald, and his mother, Margarethe
Ziegler, had come from a burgher family in Eisenach. It was a custom among
these Thuringian peasants that only one son, and that usually the
youngest, inherited the family house and the croft. The others were sent
out one by one, furnished with a small store of money from the family
strong-box, to make their way in the world. Hans Luther had determined to
become a miner in the Mansfeld district, where the policy of the Counts of
Mansfeld, of building and letting out on hire small smelting furnaces,
enabled thrifty and skilled workmen to rise in the world. The father soon
made his way. He leased one and then three of these furnaces. He won the
respect of his neighbours, for he became, in 1491, one of the four members
of the village council, and we are told that the Counts of Mansfeld held
him in esteem.
In the earlier years, when Luther was a child, the family life was one of
grinding poverty, and Luther often recalled the hard struggles of his
parents. He had often seen his mother carrying the wood for the family
fire from the forest on her poor shoulders. The child grew up among the
hard, grimy, coarse surroundings of the German working-class life,
protected from much that was evil by the wise severity of his parents. He
imbibed its simple political and ecclesiastical ideas. He learned that the
Emperor was God’s ruler on earth, who would protect poor people against
the Turk, and that the Church was the “Pope’s House,” in which the Bishop
of Rome was the house-father. He was taught the Creed, the Ten
Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer. He sang such simple evangelical hymns
as “Ein Kindelein so lobelich,” “Nun bitten wir den heiligen Geist,” and
“Crist ist erstanden.” He was a dreamy, contemplative child; and the
unseen world was never out of his thoughts. He knew that some of the
miners practised sorcery in dark corners below the earth. He feared an old
woman who lived near; she was a witch, and the priest himself was afraid
of her. He was taught about Hell and Purgatory and the Judgment to come.
He shivered whenever he looked at the stained-glass window in the parish
church and saw the frowning face of Jesus, who, seated on a rainbow and
with a flaming sword in His hand, was coming to judge him, he knew not
when. He saw the crowds of pilgrims who streamed past Mansfeld, carrying
their crucifixes high, and chanting their pilgrim songs, going to the
Bruno Quertfort chapel or to the old church at Wimmelberg. He saw
paralytics and maimed folk carried along the roads, going to embrace the
wooden cross at Kyffhaüser, and find a miraculous cure; and sick people on
their way to the cloister church at Wimmelberg to be cured by the sound of
the blessed bells.
The boy Luther went to the village school in Mansfeld, and endured the
cruelties of a merciless pedagogue. He was sent for a year, in 1497, to a
school of the Brethren of the Common Lot in Magdeburg. Then he went to St.
George’s school in Eisenach, where he remained three years. He was a “poor
scholar,” which meant a boy who received his lodging and education free,
was obliged to sing in the church choir, and was allowed to sing in the
streets, begging for food. The whole town was under the spell of St.
Elizabeth, the pious landgravine, who had given up family life and all
earthly comforts to earn a mediæval saintship. It contained nine
monasteries and nunneries, many of them dating back to the days of St.
Elizabeth; her good deeds were emblazoned on the windows of the church in
which Luther sang as choir-boy; he had long conversations with the monks
who belonged to her foundations. The boy was being almost insensibly
attracted to that revival of the mediæval religious life which was the
popular religious force of these days. He had glimpses of the old homely
evangelical piety, this time accompanied by a refinement of manners Luther
had hitherto been unacquainted with, in the house of a lady who is
identified by biographers with a certain Frau Cotta. The boy enjoyed it
intensely, and his naturally sunny nature expanded under its influence.
But it did not touch him religiously. He has recorded that it was with
incredulous surprise that he heard his hostess say that there was nothing
on earth more lovely than the love of husband and wife, when it is in the
fear of the Lord.
After three years’ stay at Eisenach, Luther entered the University of
Erfurt (1501), then the most famous in Germany. It had been founded in
1392 by the burghers of the town, who were intensely proud of their own
University, and especially of the fact that it had far surpassed other
seats of learning which owed their origin to princes. The academic and
burgher life were allied at Erfurt as they were in no other University
town. The days of graduation were always town holidays, and at the
graduation processions the officials of the city walked with the
University authorities. Luther tells us that when he first saw the newly
made graduates marching in their new graduation robes in the middle of the
procession, he thought that they had attained to the summit of earthly
felicity. The University of Erfurt was also strictly allied to the Church.
Different Popes had enriched it with privileges; the Primate of Germany,
the Archbishop of Mainz, was its Chancellor: many of its professors held
ecclesiastical prebends, or were monks; each faculty was under the
protection of a tutelary saint; the teachers had to swear to teach nothing
opposed to the doctrines of the Roman Church; and special pains were taken
to prevent the rise and spread of heresy.
Its students were exposed to a greater variety of influences than those of
any other seat of learning in Germany. Its theology represented the more
modern type of scholastic, the Scotist; its philosophy was the nominalist
teaching of William of Occam, whose great disciple, Gabriel Biel (d.
1495), had been one of its most celebrated professors; the system of
biblical interpretation, first introduced by Nicholas de Lyra(132) (d.
1340), had been long taught at Erfurt by a succession of able masters;
Humanism had won an early entrance, and in Luther’s time the Erfurt circle
of “Poets” was already famous. The strongly anti-clerical teaching of John
of Wessel, who had lectured in Erfurt for fifteen years (1445-1460), had
left its mark on the University, and was not forgotten. Hussite
propagandists, Luther tells us, appeared from time to time, whispering
among the students their strange, anti-clerical Christian socialism.
While, as if by way of antidote, there came Papal Legates, whose
magnificence bore witness to the might of the Roman Church.
Luther had been sent to Erfurt to learn Law, and the Faculty of Philosophy
gave the preliminary training required. The young student worked hard at
the prescribed tasks. The Scholastic Philosophy, he said, left him little
time for classical studies, and he attended none of the Humanist lectures.
He found time, however, to read a good many Latin authors privately, and
also to learn something of Greek. Virgil and Plautus were his favourite
authors; Cicero also charmed him; he read Livy, Terence, and Horace. He
seems also to have read a volume of selections from Propertius, Persius,
Lucretius, Tibullus, Silvius Italicus, Statius, and Claudian. But he was
never a member of the Humanist circle; he was too much in earnest about
religious questions, and of too practical a turn of mind.
The scanty accounts of Luther’s student days show that he was a
hardworking, bright, sociable youth, and musical to the core. His
companions called him “the Philosopher,” “the Musician,” and spoke of his
lute-playing, of his singing, and of his ready power in debate. He took
his various degrees in unusually short time. He was Bachelor in 1502, and
Master in 1505. His father, proud of his son’s success, had sent him the
costly present of a _Corpus Juris_. He may have begun to attend the
lectures in the Faculty of Law, when he suddenly plunged into the Erfurt
Convent of the Augustinian Eremites.
The action was so sudden and unexpected, that contemporaries felt bound to
give all manner of explanations, and these have been woven together into
accounts which are legendary.(133) Luther himself has told us that he
entered the monastery because he _doubted of himself_; that in his case
the proverb was true, “Doubt makes a monk.” He also said that his resolve
was a sudden one, because he knew that his decision would grieve his
father and his mother.
What was the doubting? We are tempted in these days to think of
intellectual difficulties, and Luther’s doubting is frequently attributed
to the self-questioning which his contact with Humanism at Erfurt had
engendered. But this idea, if not foreign to the age, was strange to
Luther. His was a simple pious nature, practical rather than speculative,
sensitive and imaginative. He could play with abstract questions; but it
was pictures that compelled him to action. He has left on record a series
of pictures which were making deeper and more permanent impression on him
as the years passed; they go far to reveal the history of his struggles,
and to tell us what the doubts were which drove him into the convent. The
picture on the window in Mansfeld church of Jesus sitting on a rainbow,
with frowning countenance and drawn sword in His hand, coming to judge the
wicked; the altar-piece at Magdeburg representing a great ship sailing
heavenwards, no one within the ship but priests or monks, and in the sea
laymen drowning, or saved by ropes thrown to them by the priests and monks
who were safe on board; the living picture of the prince of Anhalt, who to
save his soul had become a friar, and carried the begging sack on his bent
shoulders through the streets of Magdeburg; the history of St. Elizabeth
blazoned on the windows of the church at Eisenach; the young Carthusian at
Eisenach, who the boy thought was the holiest man he had ever talked to,
and who had so mortified his body that he had come to look like a very old
man; the terrible deathbed scene of the Erfurt ecclesiastical dignitary, a
man who held twenty-two benefices, and whom Luther had often seen riding
in state in the great processions, who was known to be an evil-liver, and
who when he came to die filled the room with his frantic cries. Luther
doubted whether he could ever do what he believed had to be done by him to
save his soul if he remained in the world. That was what compelled him to
become a monk, and bury himself in the convent. The lurid fires of Hell
and the pale shades of Purgatory, which are the permanent background to
Dante’s Paradise, were present to Luther’s mind from childhood. Could he
escape the one and gain entrance to the other if he remained in the world?
He doubted it, and entered the convent.
§ 3. Luther in the Erfurt Convent.
It was a convent of the Augustinian Eremites, perhaps the most highly
esteemed of monastic orders by the common people of Germany during the
earlier decades of the sixteenth century. They represented the very best
type of that superstitious mediæval revival which has been already
described.(134) It is a mistake to suppose that because they bore the name
of Augustine, the evangelical theology of the great Western Father was
known to them. Their leading theologians belonged to another and very
different school. The two teachers of theology in the Erfurt convent, when
Luther entered in 1505, were John Genser of Paltz, and John Nathin of
Neuenkirchen. The former was widely known from his writings in favour of
the strictest form of papal absolutism, of the doctrine of _Attrition_,
and of the efficacy of papal _Indulgences_. It is not probable that Luther
was one of his pupils; for he retired broken in health and burdened with
old age in 1507.(135) The latter, though unknown beyond the walls of the
convent, was an able and severe master. He was an ardent admirer of
Gabriel Biel, of Peter d’Ailly, and of William of Occam their common
master. He thought little of any independent study of the Holy Scriptures.
“Brother Martin,” he once said to Luther, “let the Bible alone; read the
old teachers; they give you the whole marrow of the Bible; reading the
Bible simply breeds unrest.”(136) Afterwards he commanded Luther on his
canonical obedience to refrain from Bible study.(137) It was he who made
Luther read and re-read the writings of Biel, d’Ailly, and Occam, until he
had committed to memory long passages; and who taught the Reformer to
consider Occam “his dear Master.” Nathin was a determined opponent of the
Reformation until his death in 1529; but Luther always spoke of him with
respect, and said that he was “a Christian man in spite of his monk’s
cowl.”
Luther had not come to the convent to study theology; he had entered it to
save his soul. These studies were part of the convent discipline; to
engage in them, part of his vow of obedience. He worked hard at them, and
pleased his superiors greatly; worked because he was a submissive monk.
They left a deeper impress on him than most of his biographers have cared
to acknowledge. He had more of the Schoolman in him and less of the
Humanist than any other of the men who stood in the first line of leaders
in the Reformation movement. Some of his later doctrines, and especially
his theory of the Sacrament of the Supper, came to him from these convent
studies in d’Ailly and Occam. But in his one great quest—how to save his
soul, how to win the sense of God’s pardon—they were more a hindrance than
a help. His teachers might be Augustinian Eremites, but they had not the
faintest knowledge of Augustinian experimental theology. They belonged to
the most pelagianising school of mediæval Scholastic; and their last word
always was that man must work out his own salvation. Luther tried to work
it out in the most approved later mediæval fashion, by the strictest
asceticism. He fasted and scourged himself; he practised all the ordinary
forms of maceration, and invented new ones; but all to no purpose. For
when an awakened soul, as he said long afterwards, seeks to find rest in
work-righteousness, it stands on a foundation of loose sand which it feels
running and travelling beneath it; and it must go from one good work to
another and to another, and so on without end. Luther was undergoing all
unconsciously the experience of Augustine, and what tortured and terrified
the great African was torturing him. He had learned that man’s goodness is
not to be measured by his neighbour’s but by God’s, and that man’s sin is
not to be weighed against the sins of his neighbours, but against the
righteousness of God. His theological studies told him that God’s pardon
could be had through the Sacrament of Penance, and that the first part of
that sacrament was sorrow for sin. But then came a difficulty. The older,
and surely the better theology, explained that this godly sorrow
(_contritio_) must be based on love to God. Had he this love? God always
appeared to him as an implacable Judge, inexorably threatening punishment
for the breaking of a law which it seemed impossible to keep. He had to
confess to himself that he sometimes almost hated this arbitrary Will
which the nominalist Schoolmen called God. The more modern theology, that
taught by the chief convent theologian, John of Paltz, asserted that the
sorrow might be based on meaner motives (_attritio_), and that this
attrition was changed into contrition in the Sacrament of Penance itself.
So Luther wearied his superiors by his continual use of this sacrament.
The slightest breach of the most trifling conventual regulation was looked
on as a sin, and had to be confessed at once and absolution for it
received, until the perplexed lad was ordered to cease confession until he
had committed some sin worth confessing. His brethren believed him to be a
miracle of piety. They boasted about him in their monkish fashion, and in
all the monasteries around, and as far away as Grimma, the monks and nuns
talked about the young saint in the Erfurt convent. Meanwhile the “young
saint” himself lived a life of mental anguish, whispering to himself that
he was “gallows-ripe.” Writing in 1518, years after the conflict was over,
Luther tells us that no pen could describe the mental anguish he
endured.(138) Gleams of comfort came to him, but they were transient. The
Master of the Novices gave him salutary advice; an aged brother gave him
momentary comfort. John Staupitz, the Vicar-General of the Congregation,
during his visits to the convent was attracted by the traces of hidden
conflicts and sincere endeavour of the young monk, with his high
cheek-bones, emaciated frame, gleaming eyes, and looks of settled despair.
He tried to find out his difficulties. He revoked Nathin’s order that
Luther should not read the Scriptures. He encouraged him to read the
Bible; he gave him a _Glossa Ordinaria_ or conventual ecclesiastical
commentary, where passages were explained by quotations from eminent
Church Fathers, and difficulties were got over by much pious allegorising;
above all, he urged him to become a good _localis_ and _textualis_ in the
Bible, _i.e._ one who, when he met with difficulties, did not content
himself with commentaries, but made collections of parallel passages for
himself, and found explanations of one in the others. Still this brought
at first little help. At last Staupitz saw the young man’s real
difficulty, and gave him real and lasting assistance. He showed Luther
that he had been rightly enough contrasting man’s sin and God’s holiness,
and measuring the depth of the one by the height of the other; that he had
been following the truest instincts of the deepest piety when he had set
over-against each other the righteousness of God and the sin and
helplessness of man; but that he had gone wrong when he kept these two
thoughts in a _permanent_ opposition. He then explained that, according to
God’s promise, the righteousness of God might become man’s own possession
in and through Christ Jesus. God had promised that man could have
fellowship with Him; all fellowship is founded on personal trust; and
trust, the personal trust of the believing man on a personal God who has
promised, gives man that fellowship with God through which all things that
belong to God can become his. Without this personal trust or faith, all
divine things, the Incarnation and Passion of the Saviour, the Word and
the Sacraments, however true as matters of fact, are outside man and
cannot be truly possessed. But when man trusts God and His promises, and
when the fellowship, which trust or faith always creates, is once
established, then they can be truly possessed by the man who trusts. The
just live by their faith. These thoughts, acted upon, helped Luther
gradually to win his way to peace, and he told Staupitz long afterwards
that it was he who had made him see the rays of light which dispelled the
darkness of his soul.(139) In the end, the vision of the true relation of
the believing man to God came to him suddenly with all the force of a
personal revelation, and the storm-tossed soul was at rest. The sudden
enlightenment, the personal revelation which was to change his whole life,
came to him when he was reading the _Epistle to the Romans_ in his cell.
It came to Paul when he was riding on the road to Damascus; to Augustine
as he was lying under a fig-tree in the Milan garden; to Francis as he
paced anxiously the flag-stones of the Portiuncula chapel on the plain
beneath Assisi; to Suso as he sat at table in the morning. It spoke
through different words:—to Paul, “Why persecutest thou Me?”;(140) to
Augustine, “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for
the flesh”;(141) to Francis, “Get you no gold, nor silver, nor brass in
your purses, no wallet for your journey, neither two coats, nor shoes, nor
staff”;(142) to Suso, “My son, if thou wilt hear My words.”(143) But
though the words were different, the personal revelation, which mastered
the men, was the same: That trust in the All-merciful God, who has
revealed Himself in Jesus Christ, creates companionship with God, and that
all other things are nothing in comparison with this fellowship. It was
this contact with the Unseen which fitted Luther for his task as the
leader of men in an age which was longing for a revival of moral living
inspired by a fresh religious impulse.(144)
It is not certain how long Luther’s protracted struggle lasted. There are
indications that it went on for two years, and that he did not attain to
inward peace until shortly before he was sent to Wittenberg in 1508. The
intensity and sincerity of the conflict marked him for life. The
conviction that he, weak and sinful as he was, nevertheless lived in
personal fellowship with the God whose love he was experiencing, became
the one fundamental fact of life on which he, a human personality, could
take his stand as on a foundation of rock; and standing on it, feeling his
own strength, he could also be a source of strength to others. Everything
else, however venerable and sacred it might once have seemed, might prove
untrustworthy without hereafter disturbing Luther’s religious life,
provided only this one thing remained to him. For the moment, however,
nothing seemed questionable. The inward change altered nothing external.
He still believed that the Church was the “Pope’s House”; he accepted all
its usages and institutions—its Masses and its relics, its indulgences and
its pilgrimages, its hierarchy and its monastic life. He was still a monk
and believed in his vocation.
Luther’s theological studies were continued. He devoted himself especially
to Bernard, in whose sermons on the _Song of Solomon_ he found the same
thoughts of the relation of the believing soul to God which had given him
comfort. He began to show himself a good man of business with an eye to
the heart of things. Staupitz and his chiefs entrusted him with some
delicate commissions on behalf of the Order, and made quiet preparations
for his advancement. In 1508 he, with a few other monks, was sent from
Erfurt to the smaller convent at Wittenberg, to assist the small
University there.
§ 4. Luther’s early Life in Wittenberg.
About the beginning of the century, Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony
and head of the Ernestine branch of his family, had resolved to establish
a University for his dominions. Frederick had maintained close relations
with the Augustinian Eremites ever since he had made acquaintance with
them when a schoolboy at Grimma, and the Vicar-General, John Staupitz,
along with Dr. Pollich of Mellerstadt, were his chief advisers. It might
almost be said that the new University was, from the beginning, an
educational establishment belonging to the Order of monks which Luther had
joined. Staupitz himself was one of the professors, and Dean of the
Faculty of Theology; another Augustinian Eremite was Dean of the Faculty
of Arts; the Patron Saints of the Order of the Blessed Virgin and St.
Augustine were the Patron Saints of the University; St. Paul was the
Patron Saint of the Faculty of Theology, and on the day of his conversion
there was a special celebration of the Mass with a sermon, at which the
Rector (Dr. Pollich) and the whole teaching staff were present.
The University was poorly endowed. Electoral Saxony was not a rich
principality; some mining industry did exist in the south end, and Zwickau
was the centre of a great weaving trade; but the great proportion of the
inhabitants, whether of villages or towns, subsisted on agriculture of a
poor kind. There was not much money at the Electoral court. A sum got from
the sale of Indulgences some years before, which Frederick had not allowed
to leave the country, served to make a beginning. The prebends attached to
the Church of All Saints (the Castle Church) supplied the salaries of some
professors; the others were Augustinian Eremites, who gave their services
gratuitously.
The town of Wittenberg was more like a large village than the capital of a
principality. In 1513 it only contained 3000 inhabitants and 356 rateable
houses. The houses were for the most part mean wooden dwellings, roughly
plastered with clay. The town lay in the very centre of Germany, but it
was far from any of the great trade routes; the inhabitants had a good
deal of Wendish blood in their veins, and were inclined to be sluggish and
intemperate. The environs were not picturesque, and the surrounding
country had a poor soil. Altogether it was scarcely the place for a
University. Imperial privileges were obtained from the Emperor Maximilian,
and the University was opened on the 18th of October 1502.
One or two eminent teachers had been induced to come to the new
University. Staupitz collected promising young monks from many convents of
his Order and enrolled them as students, and the University entered 416
names on its books during its first year. This success seems to have been
somewhat artificial, for the numbers gradually declined to 56 in the
summer session of 1505. Staupitz, however, encouraged Frederick to
persevere.
It was in the interests of the young University that Luther and a band of
brother monks were sent from Erfurt to the Wittenberg convent. There he
was set to teach the Dialectic and Physics of Aristotle,—a hateful
task,—but whether to the monks in the convent or in the University it is
impossible to say. All the while Staupitz urged him to study theology in
order to teach it. It was then that Luther began his systematic study of
Augustine. He also began to preach. His first sermons were delivered in an
old chapel, 30 feet long and 20 feet wide, built of wood plastered over
with clay. He preached to the monks. Dr. Pollich, the Rector, went
sometimes to hear him, and spoke to the Elector of the young monk with
piercing eyes and strange fancies in his head.
His work was interrupted by a command to go to Rome on business of his
Order (autumn 1511). His selection was a great honour, and Luther felt it
to be so; but it may be questioned whether he did not think more of the
fact that he would visit the Holy City as a devout pilgrim, and be able to
avail himself of the spiritual privileges which he believed were to be
found there. When he got to the end of his journey and first caught a
glimpse of the city, he raised his hands in an ecstasy, exclaiming, “I
greet thee, thou Holy Rome, thrice holy from the blood of the martyrs.”
When his official work was done he set about seeing the Holy City with the
devotion of a pilgrim. He visited all the famous shrines, especially those
to which Indulgences were attached. He listened reverently to all the
accounts given of the relics which were exhibited to the pilgrims, and
believed in all the tales told him. He thought that if his parents had
been dead he could have assured them against Purgatory by saying Masses in
certain chapels. Only once, it is said, his soul showed revolt. He was
slowly climbing on his knees the _Scala Santa_ (really a mediæval
staircase), said to have been the stone steps leading up to Pilate’s house
in Jerusalem, once trodden by the feet of our Lord; when half-way up the
thought came into his mind, _The just shall live by his faith_; he stood
upright and walked slowly down. He saw, as thousands of pious German
pilgrims had done before his time, the moral corruptions which disgraced
the Holy City—infidel priests who scoffed at the sacred mysteries they
performed, and princes of the Church who lived in open sin. He saw and
loathed the moral degradation, and the scenes imprinted themselves on his
memory; but his home and cloister training enabled him, for the time
being, in spite of the loathing, to revel in the memorials of the old
heroic martyrs, and to look on their relics as storehouses of divine
grace. In later days it was the memories of the vices of the Roman Court
that helped him to harden his heart against the sentiment which surrounded
the Holy City.
When Luther returned to Wittenberg in the early summer of 1512, his
Vicar-General sent him to Erfurt to complete his training for the
doctorate in theology. He graduated as Doctor of the Holy Scripture, took
the Wittenberg Doctor’s oath to defend the evangelical truth vigorously
(_viriliter_), was made a member of the Wittenberg Senate, and three weeks
later succeeded Staupitz as Professor of Theology.
Luther was still a genuine monk, with no doubt of his vocation. He became
sub-prior of the Wittenberg convent in 1512, and was made the District
Vicar over the eleven convents in Meissen and Thuringia in 1515. But that
side of his life may be passed over. It is his theological work as
professor in Wittenberg University that is important for his career as a
reformer.
§ 5. Luther’s early Lectures in Theology.
From the beginning his lectures on theology differed from those ordinarily
given, but not because he had any theological opinions at variance with
those of his old teachers at Erfurt. No one attributed any sort of
heretical views to the young Wittenberg professor. His mind was intensely
practical, and he believed that theology might be made useful to guide men
to find the grace of God and to tell them how, having acquired through
trust a sense of fellowship with God, they could persevere in a life of
joyous obedience to God and His commandments. The Scholastic theologians
of Erfurt and elsewhere did not look on theology as a practical discipline
of this kind. Luther thought that theology ought to discuss such matters,
and he knew that his main interest in theology lay on this practical side.
Besides, as he has told us, he regarded himself as specially set apart to
lecture on the Holy Scriptures. So, like John Colet, he began by
expounding the Epistles of St. Paul and the Psalms.
Luther never knew much Hebrew, and he used the Vulgate in his prelections.
He had a huge widely printed volume on his desk, and wrote out the heads
of his lectures between the printed lines. Some of the pages still survive
in the Wolfenbüttel Library, and can be studied.(145)
He made some use of the commentaries of Nicholas de Lyra, but got most
assistance from passages in Augustine, Bernard, and Gerson,(146) which
dealt with practical religion,(147) His lectures were experimental. He
started with the fact of man’s sin, the possibility of reaching a sense of
pardon and of fellowship with God through trust in His promises. From the
beginning we find in the germ what grew to be the main thoughts in the
later Lutheran theology. Men are redeemed apart from any merits of their
own; God’s grace is really His mercy revealed in the mission and work of
Christ; it has to do with the forgiveness of sins, and is the fulfilment
of His promises; man’s faith is trust in the historical work of Christ and
in the verity of God. These thoughts were for the most part all expressed
in the formal language of the Scholastic Theology of the day. They grew in
clearness, and took shape in a series of propositions which formed the
common basis of his teaching: man wins pardon through the free grace of
God: when man lays hold on God’s promise of pardon he becomes a new
creature; this sense of pardon is the beginning of a new life of
sanctification; the life of faith is Christianity on its inward side; the
contrast between the law and the gospel is something fundamental: there is
a real distinction between the outward and visible Church and the ideal
Church, which latter is to be described by its spiritual and moral
relations to God after the manner of Augustine. All these thoughts simply
pushed aside the ordinary theology as taught in the schools without
staying to criticise it.
In the years 1515 and 1516, which bear traces of a more thoroughgoing
study of Augustine and of the German mediæval Mystics, Luther began to
find that he could not express the thoughts he desired to convey in the
ordinary language of Scholastic Theology, and that its phrases suggested
ideas other than those he wished to set forth. He tried to find another
set of expressions. It is characteristic of Luther’s conservatism, that in
theological phraseology, as afterwards in ecclesiastical institutions and
ceremonies, he preferred to retain what had been in use provided only he
could put his own evangelical meaning into it in a not too arbitrary
way.(148) Having found that the Scholastic phraseology did not always suit
his purpose, he turned to the popular mystical authors, and discovered
there a rich store of phrases in which he could express his ideas of the
imperfection of man towards what is good. Along with this change in
language, and related to it, we find evidence that Luther was beginning to
think less highly of the monastic life with its _external_ renunciations.
The thought of predestination, meaning by that not an abstract
metaphysical category, but the conception that the whole believer’s life,
and what it involved, depended in the last resort on God and not on man,
came more and more into the foreground. Still there does not seem any
disposition to criticise or to repudiate the current theology of the day.
The earliest traces of _conscious_ opposition appeared about the middle of
1516, and characteristically on the practical and not on the speculative
side of theology. They began in a sermon on Indulgences, preached in July
1516. Once begun, the breach widened until Luther could contrast “our
theology”(149) (the theology taught by Luther and his colleagues at
Wittenberg) with what was taught elsewhere, and notably at Erfurt. The
former represented Augustine and the Holy Scriptures, and the latter was
founded on Aristotle. In September 1517 he raised the standard of
theological revolt, and wrote directly against the “Scholastic Theology”;
he declared that it was Pelagian at heart, and buried out of sight the
Augustinian doctrines of grace; he lamented the fact that it neglected to
teach the supreme value of faith and of inward righteousness; that it
encouraged men to seek escape from what was due for sin by means of
Indulgences, instead of exhorting them to practise the inward repentance
which belongs to every genuine Christian life.
It was at this interesting stage of his own religious development that
Luther felt himself forced to oppose publicly the sale of Indulgences in
Germany.
By the year 1517, Luther had become a power in Wittenberg both as a
preacher and as a teacher. He had become the preacher in the town church,
from whose pulpit he delivered many sermons every week, taking infinite
pains to make himself understood by the “raw Saxons.” He became a great
preacher, and, like all great preachers, he denounced prevalent sins, and
bewailed the low standard of morals set before the people by the higher
ecclesiastical authorities; he said that religion was not an easy thing;
that it did not consist in the decent performance of external ceremonies;
that the sense of sin, the experience of the grace of God, and the fear of
God and the overcoming of that fear through the love of God, were all
continuous experiences.
His exegetical lectures seemed like a rediscovery of the Holy Scriptures.
Grave burghers of Wittenberg matriculated as students in order to hear
them. The fame of the lecturer spread, and students from all parts of
Germany crowded to the small remote University, until the Elector became
proud of his seat of learning and of the man who had made it prosper.
Such a man could not keep silent when he saw what he believed to be a
grave source of moral evil approaching the people whose souls God had
given him in charge; and this is how Luther came to be a Reformer.
Up to this time he had been an obedient monk, doing diligently the work
given him, highly esteemed by his superiors, fulfilling the expectations
of his Vicar-General, and recognised by all as a quiet and eminently pious
man. He had a strong, simple character, with nothing of the quixotic about
him. Of course he saw the degradation of much of the religious life of the
times, and had attended at least one meeting where those present discussed
plans of reformation. He had then (at Leitzkau in 1512) declared that
every true reformation must begin with individual men, that it must reveal
itself in a regenerate heart aflame with faith kindled by the preaching of
a pure gospel.
§ 6. The Indulgence-seller.
What drew Luther from his retirement was an Indulgence proclaimed by Pope
Leo X., farmed by Albert of Brandenburg, the Archbishop of Mainz, and
preached by John Tetzel, a Dominican monk, who had been commissioned by
Albert to sell for him the _Papal Letters_, as the Indulgence tickets were
called. It had been announced that the money raised by the sales would be
used to build the Basilica of St. Peter to be a tomb worthy of the great
Apostle, who rested, it was said, in a Roman grave.
The Indulgence-seller had usually a magnificent reception when he entered
a German town. Frederick Mecum (Myconius), who was an eye-witness, thus
describes the entrance of Tetzel into the town of Annaberg in Ducal
Saxony:
“When the Commissary or Indulgence-seller approached the town, the
Bull (proclaiming the Indulgence) was carried before him on a
cloth of velvet and gold, and all the priests and monks, the town
council, the schoolmasters and their scholars, and all the men and
women went out to meet him with banners and candles and songs,
forming a great procession; then all the bells ringing and all the
organs playing, they accompanied him to the principal church; a
red cross was set up in the midst of the church, and the Pope’s
banner was displayed; in short, one might think they were
receiving God Himself.”
The Commissary then preached a sermon extolling the Indulgence, declaring
that “the gate of heaven was open,” and that the sales would begin.
Many German princes had no great love for the Indulgence-sellers, and
Frederick, the Elector of Saxony, had prohibited Tetzel from entering his
territories. But the lands of Ernestine (Electoral) and Albertine (Ducal)
Saxony were so mixed up that it was easy for the Commissary to command the
whole population of Electoral Saxony without actually crossing the
frontier. The “Red Cross” had been set up in Zerbst in Ducal Saxony a few
miles to the west, and at Jüterbogk in the territory of Magdeburg a few
miles to the east of Wittenberg, and people had gone from the town to buy
the Indulgence. Luther believed that the sales were injurious to the moral
and religious life of his townsmen; the reports of the sermons and
addresses of the Indulgence-seller which reached him appeared to contain
what he believed to be both lies and blasphemies. He secured a copy of the
letter of recommendation given by the Archbishop to his Commissary, and
his indignation grew stronger. Still it was only after much hesitation,
after many of his friends had urged him to interfere, and in deep distress
of mind, that he resolved to protest. When he had determined to do
something he went about the matter with a mixture of caution and courage
which were characteristic of the man.
The Church of All Saints (the Castle Church) in Wittenberg had always been
intimately connected with the University; its prebendaries were
professors; its doors were used as a board on which to publish important
academic documents; and notices of public academic “disputations,” common
enough at the time, had frequently appeared there. The day of the year
which drew the largest concourse of townsmen and strangers to the church
was All Saints’ Day, the first of November. It was the anniversary of the
consecration of the building, and was commemorated by a prolonged series
of services. The Elector Frederick was a great collector of relics, and
had stored his collection in the church.(150) He had also procured an
Indulgence to benefit all who came to attend the anniversary services and
look at the relics.
On All Saints’ Day, Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of
the church. It was a strictly academic proceeding. The Professor of
Theology in Wittenberg, wishing to elucidate the truth, offered to
discuss, either by speech or by writing, the matter of Indulgences.(151)
He put forth ninety-five propositions or heads of discussion which he
proposed to maintain. Academic etiquette was strictly preserved; the
subject, judged by the numberless books which had been written on it, and
the variety of opinions expressed, was eminently suitable for debate; the
Theses were offered as subjects of debate; and the author, according to
the usage of the time in such cases, was not supposed to be definitely
committed to the opinions expressed.
The Theses, however, differed from most programmes of academic discussions
in this, that everyone wanted to read them. A duplicate was made in
German. Copies of the Latin original and the translation were sent to the
University printing-house, and the presses could not throw them off fast
enough to meet the demand which came from all parts of Germany.