One of the fine flowers of German mysticism is a book written anonymously—"spoken by the Almighty, Eternal God, through a wise, understanding, truly just man, his Friend, a priest of the Teutonic Order at Frankfort."The German Theology, [Sidenote:The German Theology] as it was named by Luther, teaches in its purest form entire abandonment to God, simple passivity in his hands, utter {32} self-denial and self-surrender, until, without the interposition of any external power, and equally without effort of her own, the soul shall find herself at one with the bridegroom. The immanence of God is taught; man's helpless and sinful condition is emphasized; and the reconciliation of the two is found only in the unconditional surrender of man's will to God. "Put off thine own will and there will be no hell."
Tauler's sermons, first published 1498, had an immense influence on Luther. They were later taken up by the Jesuit Canisius who sought by them to purify his church. [Sidenote: 1543]The German Theologywas first published by Luther in 1516, with the statement that save the Bible and St. Augustine's works, he had never met with a book from which he had learned so much of the nature of "God, Christ, man, and all things." But other theologians, both Protestant and Catholic, did not agree with him. Calvin detected secret and deadly poison in the author's pantheism, and in 1621 the Catholic Church placed his work on the Index.
The Netherlands also produced a school of mystics, later in blooming than that of the Germans and greater in its direct influence. The earliest of them was John of Ruysbroeck, a man of visions and ecstasies. [Sidenote: Ruysbroeck, 1293-1381] He strove to make his life one long contemplation of the light and love of God. Two younger men, Gerard Groote and Florence Radewyn, socialized his gospel by founding the fellowship of the Brethren of the Common Life. [Sidenote: Groote, 1340-84] [Sidenote: Radewyn, 1350-1400] Though never an order sanctioned by the church, they taught celibacy and poverty, and devoted themselves to service of their fellows, chiefly in the capacity of teachers of boys.
The fifteenth century's rising tide of devotion brought forth the most influential of the products of all the mystics, theImitation of Christby Thomas à Kempis. [Sidenote: Thomas à Kempis, c. 1380-1471] Written in a plaintive minor key of {33} resignation and pessimism, it sets forth with much artless eloquence the ideal of making one's personal life approach that of Christ. Humility, self-restraint, asceticism, patience, solitude, love of Jesus, prayer, and a diligent use of the sacramental grace of the eucharist are the means recommended to form the character of the perfect Christian. It was doubtless because all this was so perfect an expression of the medieval ideal that it found such wide and instant favor. There is no questioning of dogma, nor any speculation on the positions of the church; all this is postulated with child-like simplicity. Moreover, the ideal of the church for the salvation of the individual, and the means supposed to secure that end, are adopted by à Kempis. He tacitly assumes that the imitator of Christ will be a monk, poor and celibate. His whole endeavor was to stimulate an enthusiasm for privation and a taste for things spiritual, and it was because in his earnestness and single-mindedness he so largely succeeded that his book was eagerly seized by the hands of thousands who desired and needed such stimulation and help. The Dutch canon was not capable of rising to the heights of Tauler and the Frankfort priest, who saw in the love of God a good in itself transcending the happiness of one's own soul. He just wanted to be saved and tried to love God for that purpose with all his might. But this careful self-cultivation made his religion self-centered; it was, compared even with the professions of the Protestants and of the Jesuits, personal and unsocial.
Notwithstanding the profound differences between the Mystics and the Reformers, it is possible to see that at least in one respect the two movements were similar. It was exactly the same desire to get away from the mechanical and formal in the church's scheme of salvation, that animated both. Tauler and Luther {34} both deprecated good works and sought justification in faith only. Important as this is, it is possible to see why the mystics failed to produce a real revolt from the church, and it is certain that they were far more than the Reformers fundamentally, even typically Catholic. [Sidenote: Mysticism] It is true that mysticism is at heart always one, neither national nor confessional. But Catholicism offered so favorable a field for this development that mysticism may be considered as the efflorescence of Catholic pietypar excellence. Hardly any other expression of godliness as an individual, vital thing, was possible in medieval Christendom. There is not a single idea in the fourteenth and fifteenth century mysticism which cannot be read far earlier in Augustine and Bernard, even in Aquinas and Scotus. It could never be anything but a sporadic phenomenon because it was so intensely individual. While it satisfied the spiritual needs of many, it could never amalgamate with other forces of the time, either social or intellectual. As a philosophy or a creed it led not so much to solipsism as to a complete abnegation of the reason. Moreover it was slightly morbid, liable to mistake giddiness of starved nerve and emotion for a moment of vision and of union with God. How much more truly than he knew did Ruysbroeck speak when he said that the soul, turned inward, could see the divine light, just as the eyeball, sufficiently pressed, could see the flashes of fire in the mind!
The men who, in later ages, claimed for their ancestors a Protestantism older than the Augsburg Confession, referred its origins not to the mystics nor to the humanists, but to bold leaders branded by the church as heretics. Though from the earliest age Christendom never lacked minds independent enough {35} to differ from authority and characters strong enough to attempt to cut away what they considered rotten in ecclesiastical doctrine and practice, the first heretics that can really be considered as harbingers of the Reformation were two sects dwelling in Southern France, the Albigenses and the Waldenses. [Sidenote: Albigenses] The former, first met with in the eleventh century, derived part of their doctrines from oriental Manichaeism, part from primitive gnosticism. The latter were the followers of Peter Waldo, a rich merchant of Lyons who, about 1170, sold his goods and went among the poor preaching the gospel. [Sidenote: Waldenses] Though quite distinct in origin both sects owed their success with the people to their attacks on the corrupt lives of the clergy, to their use of the vernacular New Testament, to their repudiation of part of the sacramental system, and to their own earnest and ascetic morality. The story of their savage suppression, at the instigation of Pope Innocent III, [Sidenote: 1209-29] in the Albigensian crusade, is one of the darkest blots on the pages of history. A few remnants of them survived in the mountains of Savoy and Piedmont, harried from time to time by blood-thirsty pontiffs. In obedience to a summons of Innocent VIII King Charles VIII of France massacred many of them. [Sidenote: 1437]
The spiritual ancestors of Luther, however, were not so much the French heretics as two Englishmen, Occam and Wyclif. [Sidenote: Occam, d. c. 1349] William of Occam, a Franciscan who taught at Oxford, was the most powerful scholastic critic of the existing church. Untouched by the classic air breathed by the humanists, he said all that could be said against the church from her own medieval standpoint. He taught determinism; he maintained that the final seat of authority was the Scripture; he showed that such fundamental dogmas as the existence of God, the Trinity, and the Incarnation, cannot be deduced by logic from the given premises; he {36} proposed a modification of the doctrine of transubstantiation in the interests of reason, approaching closely in his ideas to the "consubstantiation" of Luther. Defining the church as the congregation of the faithful, he undermined her governmental powers. This, in fact, is just what he wished to do, for he went ahead of almost all his contemporaries in proposing that the judicial powers of the clergy be transferred to the civil government. Not only, in his opinion, should the civil ruler be totally independent of the pope, but even such matters as the regulation of marriage should be left to the common law.
[Sidenote: Wyclif, 1324-84]
A far stronger impression on his age was made by John Wyclif, the most significant of the Reformers before Luther. He, too, was an Oxford professor, a schoolman, and a patriot, but he was animated by a deeper religious feeling than was Occam. In 1361 he was master of Balliol College, where he lectured for many years on divinity. At the same time he held various benefices in turn, the last, the pastorate of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, from 1374 till his death. He became a reformer somewhat late in life owing to study of the Bible and of the bad condition of the English church. [Sidenote: 1374] At the peace congress at Bruges as a commissioner to negotiate with papal ambassadors for the relief of crying abuses, he became disillusioned in his hope for help from that quarter. He then turned to the civil government, urging it to regain the usurped authority of the church. This plan, set forth in voluminous writings, in lectures at Oxford and in popular sermons in London, soon brought him before the tribunal [Sidenote: 1377] of William Courtenay, Bishop of London, and, had he not been protected by the powerful prince, John of Lancaster, it might have gone hard with him. Five bulls launched against him by Gregory XI from Rome only confirmed him in his course, for he {37} appealed from them to Parliament. Tried at Lambeth he was forbidden to preach or teach, and he therefore retired for the rest of his life to Lutterworth. [Sidenote: 1378] He continued his literary labors, resulting in a vast host of pamphlets.
Examining his writings we are struck by the fact that his program was far more religious and practical than rational and speculative. Save transubstantiation, he scrupled at none of the mysteries of Catholicism. It is also noticeable that social reform left him cold. When the laborers rose under Wat Tyler, [Sidenote: 1381] Wyclif sided against them, as he also proposed that confiscated church property be given rather to the upper classes than to the poor. The real principles of Wyclif's reforms were but two: to abolish the temporal power of the church, and to purge her of immoral ministers. It was for this reason that he set up the authority of Scripture against that of tradition; it was for this that he doubted the efficacy of sacraments administered by priests living in mortal sin; it was for this that he denied the necessity of auricular confession; it was for this that he would have placed the temporal power over the spiritual. The bulk of his writings, in both Latin and English, is fierce, measureless abuse of the clergy, particularly of prelates and of the pope. The head of Christendom is called Antichrist over and over again; the bishops, priests and friars are said to have their lips full of lies and their hands of blood; to lead women astray; to live in idleness, luxury, simony and deceit; and to devour the English church. Marriage of the clergy is recommended. Indulgences are called a cursed robbery.
To combat the enemies of true piety Wyclif relied on two agencies. The first was the Bible, which, with the assistance of friends, he Englished from the {38} Vulgate. None of the later Reformers was more bent upon giving the Scriptures to the laity, and none attributed to it a higher degree of inspiration. As a second measure Wyclif trained "poor priests" to be wandering evangelists spreading abroad the message of salvation among the populace. For a time they attained considerable success, notwithstanding the fact that the severe persecution to which they were subjected caused all of Wyclif's personal followers to recant. [Sidenote: 1401] The passage of the actDe Haeretico Comburendowas not, however, in vain, for in the fifteenth century a number of common men were found with sufficient resolution to die for their faith. It is probable that, as Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London wrote in 1523, the Lollards, as they were called, were the first to welcome Lutheranism into Britain.
But if the seed produced but a moderate harvest in England it brought forth a hundred-fold in Bohemia. Wyclif's writings, carried by Czech students from Oxford to Prague, were eagerly studied by some of the attendants at that university, the greatest of whom was John Huss. [Sidenote: Huss, 1369-1415] Having taken his bachelor's degree there in 1393, he had given instruction since 1398 and became the head of the university (Rector) for the year 1402. Almost the whole content of his lectures, as of his writings, was borrowed from Wyclif, from whom he copied not only his main ideas but long passages verbatim and without specific acknowledgment. Professors and students of his own race supported him, but the Germans at the university took offence and a long struggle ensued, culminating in the secession of the Germans in a body in 1409 to found a new university at Leipsic. The quarrel, having started over a philosophic question,—Wyclif and Huss being realists and the Germans nominalists,—took a more serious turn when it came to a definition of the church {39} and of the respective spheres of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. Defining the church as the body of the predestinate, and starting a campaign against indulgences, Huss soon fell under the ban of his superiors. After burning the bulls of John XXIII Huss withdrew from Prague. Summoned to the Council of Constance, he went thither, under safe-conduct from the Emperor Sigismund, and was immediately cast into a noisome dungeon. [Sidenote: 1411, 1412]
[Sidenote: 1414]
The council proceeded to consider the opinions of Wyclif, condemning 260 of his errors and ordering his bones to be dug up and burnt, as was done twelve years later. Every effort was then made to get Huss to recant a list of propositions drawn up by the council and attributed to him. Some of these charges were absurd, as that he was accused of calling himself the fourth person of the Trinity. Other opinions, like the denial of transubstantiation, he declared, and doubtless with truth, that he had never held. Much was made of his saying that he hoped his soul would be with the soul of Wyclif after death, and the emperor was alarmed by his argument that neither priest nor king living in mortal sin had a right to exercise his office. He was therefore condemned to the stake.
His death was perfect. His last letters are full of calm resolution, love to his friends, and forgiveness to his enemies. Haled to the cathedral where the council sat on July 6, 1415, he was given one last chance to recant and save his life. Refusing, he was stripped of his vestments, and a paper crown with three demons painted on it put on his head with the words, "We commit thy soul to the devil"; he was then led to the public square and burnt alive. Sigismund, threatened by the council, made no effort to redeem his safe-conduct, and in September the reverend fathers passed a decree that no safe-conduct to a heretic, and {40} no pledge prejudicial to the Catholic faith, could be considered binding. Among the large concourse of divines not one voice was raised against this treacherous murder.
Huss's most prominent follower, Jerome of Prague, after recantation, returned to his former position and was burnt at Constance on May 30, 1416. A bull of 1418 ordered the similar punishment of all heretics who maintained the positions of Wyclif, Huss, or Jerome of Prague.
As early as September a loud remonstrance against the treatment of their master was voiced by the Bohemian Diet. The more radical party, known as Taborites, rejected transubstantiation, worship of the saints, prayers for the dead, indulgences, auricular confession, and oaths. They allowed women to preach, demanded the use of the vernacular in divine service and the giving of the cup to the laity. A crusade was started against them, but they knew how to defend themselves. The Council of Basle [Sidenote: 1431-6] was driven to negotiate with them and ended by a compromise allowing the cup to the laity and some other reforms. Subsequent efforts to reduce them proved futile. Under King Podiebrad the Ultraquists maintained their rights.
Some Hussites, however, continued as a separate body, calling themselves Bohemian Brethren. First met with in 1457 they continue to the present day as Moravians. They were subject to constant persecution. In 1505 the Catholic official James Lilienstayn drew up an interesting list of their errors. It seems that their cardinal tenet was the supremacy of Scripture, without gloss, tradition, or interpretation by the Fathers of the church. They rejected the primacy of the pope, and all ceremonies for which authority could not be found in the Bible, and they denied the efficacy of masses for the dead and the validity of indulgences.
{41} With much reason Wyclif and Huss have been called "Reformers before the Reformation." Luther himself, not knowing the Englishman, recognized his deep indebtedness to the Bohemian. All of their program, and more, he carried through. His doctrine of justification by faith only, with its radical transformation of the sacramental system, cannot be found in these his predecessors, and this was a difference of vast importance.
Inevitably, the growth of national sentiment spoken of above reacted on the religious institutions of Europe. Indeed, it was here that the conflict of the international, ecclesiastical state, and of the secular governments became keenest. Both kings and people wished to control their own spiritual affairs as well as their temporalities.
[Sidenote: The ecclesia Anglicana]
England traveled farthest on the road towards a national church. For three centuries she had been asserting the rights of her government to direct spiritual as well as temporal matters. The Statute of Mortmain [Sidenote: 1279] forbade the alienation of land from the jurisdiction of the civil power by appropriating it to religious persons. The withdrawing of land from the obligation to pay taxes and feudal dues was thus checked. The encroachment of the civil power, both in England and France, was bitterly felt by the popes. Boniface VIII endeavored to stem the flood by the bullClericis laicos[Sidenote: 1296] forbidding the taxation of clergy by any secular government, and the bullUnam Sanctam[Sidenote: 1302] asserting the universal monarchy of the Roman pontiff in the strongest possible terms. But these exorbitant claims were without effect. The Statute of Provisors [Sidenote: 1351 and 1390] forbade the appointment to English benefices by the pope, and the Statute of Praemunire [Sidenote: 1353 and 1393] took away the right of {42} English subjects to appeal from the courts of their own country to Rome. The success of Wyclif's movement was largely due to his patriotism. Though the signs of strife with the pope were fewer in the fifteenth century, there is no doubt that the national feeling persisted.
[Sidenote: The Gallican Church]
France manifested a spirit of liberty hardly less fierce than that of England. It was the French King Philip the Fair who humiliated Boniface VIII so severely that he died of chagrin. During almost the whole of the fourteenth century the residence of a pope subservient to France at Avignon prevented any difficulties, but no sooner had the Council of Constance restored the head of the unified church to Rome than the old conflict again burst forth. [Sidenote: 1438] The extreme claims of the Gallican church were asserted in the law known as the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, by which the pope was left hardly any right of appointment, of jurisdiction, or of raising revenue in France. The supremacy of a council over the pope was explicitly asserted, as was the right of the civil magistrate to order ecclesiastical affairs in his dominions. When the pontiffs refused to recognize this almost schismatical position taken by France, the Pragmatic Sanction was further fortified by a law sentencing to death any person who should bring into the country a bull repugnant to it. Strenuous efforts of the papacy were directed to secure the repeal of this document, and in 1461 Pius II induced Louis XI to revoke it in return for political concessions in Naples. This action, opposed by the University and Parlement of Paris, proved so unpopular that two years later the Gallican liberties were reasserted in their full extent.
Harmony was established between the interests of the curia and of the French government by the compromise known as the Concordat of Bologna. [Sidenote: 1516] The {43} concessions to the king were so heavy that it was difficult for Leo X to get his cardinals to consent to them. Almost the whole power of appointment, of jurisdiction, and of taxation was put into the royal hands, some stipulations being made against the conferring of benefices on immoral priests and against the frivolous imposition of ecclesiastical punishments. What the pope gained was the abandonment of the assertion made at Bourges of the supremacy of a general council. The Concordat was greeted by a storm of protest in France. The Sorbonne refused to recognize it and appealed at once to a general council. The king, however, had the refractory members arrested and decreed the repeal of the Pragmatic Sanction in 1518.
In Italy and Germany the growth of a national state [Sidenote: Italy] was retarded by the fact that one was the seat of the pope, the other of the emperor, each of them claiming a universal authority. Moreover, these two powers were continually at odds. The long investiture strife, culminating in the triumph of Gregory VII at Canossa [Sidenote: 1077] and ending in the Concordat of Worms, [Sidenote: 1122] could not permanently settle the relations of the two. Whereas Aquinas and the Canon Law maintained the superiority of the pope, there were not lacking asserters of the imperial preëminence. William of Occam's argument to prove that the emperor might depose an heretical pope was taken up by Marsiglio of Padua, whoseDefender of the Peace[Sidenote: c. 1324] ranks among the ablest of political pamphlets. In order to reduce the power of the pope, whom he called "the great dragon and old serpent," he advanced the civil government to a complete supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs. He stated that the only authority in matters of faith was the Bible, with the necessary interpretation given it by a general council composed of both clergy and laymen; that the emperor had the right to convoke and {44} direct this council and to punish all priests, prelates and the supreme pontiff; that the Canon Law had no validity; that no temporal punishment should be visited on heresy save by the state, and no spiritual punishment be valid without the consent of the state.
[Sidenote: Germany]
With such a weapon in their hands the emperors might have taken an even stronger stand than did the kings of England and France but for the lack of unity in their dominions. Germany was divided into a large number of practically independent states. It was in these and not in the empire as a whole that an approach was made to a form of national church, such as was realized after Luther had broken the bondage of Rome. When Duke Rudolph IV of Austria in the fourteenth century stated that he intended to be pope, archbishop, archdeacon and dean in his own land, when the dukes of Bavaria, Saxony and Cleves made similar boasts, they but put in a strong form the program that they in part realized. The princes gradually acquired the right of patronage to church benefices, and they permitted no bulls to be published, no indulgences sold, without their permission. The Free Cities acted in much the same way. The authority of the German states over their own spiritualities was no innovation of the heresy of Wittenberg.
For all Germany's internal division there was a certain national consciousness, due to the common language. In no point were the people more agreed than in their opposition to the rule of the Italian Curia. [Sidenote: 1382] At one time the monasteries of Cologne signed a compact to resist Gregory XI in a proposed levy of tithes, stating that, "in consequence of the exactions by which the Papal Court burdens the clergy the Apostolic See has fallen into contempt and the Catholic faith in these parts seems to be seriously imperiled." Again, {45} a Knight of the Teutonic Order in Prussia [Sidenote: 1430] wrote: "Greed reigns supreme in the Roman Court, and day by day finds new devices and artifices for extorting money from Germany under pretext of ecclesiastical fees. Hence arise much outcry, complaint and heart-burning. . . . Many questions about the papacy will be answered, or else obedience will ultimately be entirely renounced to escape from these outrageous exactions of the Italians."
The relief expected from the Council of Basle failed, and abuses were only made worse by a compact between Frederick III and Nicholas V, known as the Concordat of Vienna. [Sidenote: 1448] This treaty was by no means comparable with the English and French legislation, but was merely a division of the spoils between the two supreme rulers at the expense of the people. The power of appointment to high ecclesiastical positions was divided, annates were confirmed, and in general a considerable increase of the authority of the Curia was established.
Protests began at once in the form of "Gravamina" or lists of grievances drawn up at each Diet as a petition, and in part enacted into laws. In 1452 the Spiritual Electors demanded that the emperor proceed with reform on the basis of the decrees of Constance. In 1457 the clergy refused to be taxed for a crusade. In 1461 the princes appealed against the sale of indulgences. The Gravamina of this year were very bitter, complaining of the practice of usury by priests, of the pomp of the cardinals and of the pope's habit of giving promises of preferment to certain sees and then declaring the places vacant on the plea of having made a "mental reservation" in favor of some one else. The Roman clergy were called in this bill of grievances "public fornicators, keepers of concubines, ruffians, pimps and sinners in various other {46} respects." Drastic proposals of reform were defeated by the pope.
[Sidenote: Gravamina]
The Gravamina continued. Those of 1479 appealed against the Mendicant Orders and against the appointment of foreigners. They clamored for a new council and for reform on the basis of the decrees of Basle; they protested against judicial appeals to Rome, against the annates and against the crusade tax. It was stated that the papal appointees were rather fitted to be drivers of mules than pastors of souls. Such words found a reverberating echo among the people. The powerful pen of Gregory of Heimburg, sometimes called "the lay Luther," roused his countrymen to a patriotic stand against the Italian usurpation.
The Diet of 1502 resolved not to let money raised by indulgences leave Germany, but to use it against the Turks. Another long list of grievances relating to the tyranny and extortion of Rome was presented in 1510. The acts of the Diet of Augsburg in the summer of 1518 are eloquent testimony to the state of popular feeling when Luther had just begun his career. To this Diet Leo X sent as special legate Cardinal Cajetan, requesting a subsidy for a crusade against the Turk. It was proposed that an impost of ten per cent. be laid on the incomes of the clergy and one of five per cent. on the rich laity. This was refused on account of the grievances of the nation against the Curia, and refused in language of the utmost violence. It was stated that the real enemy of Christianity was not the Turk but "the hound of hell" in Rome. Indulgences were branded as blood-letting.
When such was the public opinion it is clear that Luther only touched a match to a heap of inflammable material. The whole nationalist movement redounded to the benefit of Protestantism. The state-churches of {47} northern Europe are but the logical development of previous separatist tendencies.
But the preparation for the great revolt was no less thorough on the intellectual than it was on the religious and political sides. The revival of interest in classical antiquity, aptly known as the Renaissance, brought with it a searching criticism of all medieval standards and, most of all, of medieval religion. The Renaissance stands in the same relationship to the Reformation that the so-called "Enlightenment" stands to the French Revolution. The humanists of the fifteenth century were the "philosophers" of the eighteenth.
The new spirit was born in Italy. If we go back as far as Dante [Sidenote: Dante, 1265-1321] we find, along with many modern elements, such as the use of the vernacular, a completely medieval conception of the universe. His immortal poem is in one respect but a commentary on theSumma theologiaeof Aquinas; it is all about the other world. The younger contemporaries of the great Florentine [Sidenote: Petrarch, 1304-1374] began to be restless as the implications of the new spirit dawned on them. Petrarch lamented that literary culture was deemed incompatible with faith. Boccaccio was as much a child of this world as Dante was a prophet of the next. [Sidenote: Boccaccio, 1313-1375] Too simple-minded deliberately to criticize doctrine, he was instinctively opposed to ecclesiastical professions. Devoting himself to celebrating the pleasures and the pomp of life, he took especial delight in heaping ridicule on ecclesiastics, representing them as the quintessence of all impurity and hypocrisy. The first story in his famous Decameron is of a scoundrel who comes to be reputed as a saint, invoked as such and performing miracles {48} after death. The second story is of a Jew who was converted to Christianity by the wickedness of Rome, for he reasoned that no cult, not divinely supported, could survive such desperate depravity as he saw there. The third tale, of the three rings, points the moral that no one can be certain what religion is the true one. The fourth narrative, like many others, turns upon the sensuality of the monks. Elsewhere the author describes the most absurd relics, and tells how a priest deceived a woman by pretending that he was the angel Gabriel. The trend of such a work was naturally the reverse of edifying. The irreligion is too spontaneous to be called philosophic doubt; it is merely impiety.
[Sidenote: Valla, 1406-56]
But such a sentiment could not long remain content with scoffing. The banner of pure rationalism, or rather of conscious classical skepticism, was raised by a circle of enthusiasts. The most brilliant of them, and one of the keenest critics that Europe has ever produced, was Lorenzo Valla, a native of Naples, and for some years holder of a benefice at Rome. Such was the trenchancy and temper of his weapons that much of what he advanced has stood the test of time.
[Sidenote: The Donation of Constantine]
The papal claim to temporal supremacy in the Western world rested largely on a spurious document known as the Donation of Constantine. In this the emperor is represented as withdrawing from Rome in order to leave it to the pope, to whom, in return for being cured of leprosy, he gives the whole Occident. An uncritical age had received this forgery for five or six centuries without question. Doubt had been cast on it by Nicholas of Cusa and Reginald Peacock, but Valla demolished it. He showed that no historian had spoken of it; that there was no time at which it could have occurred; that it is contradicted by other contemporary acts; that the barbarous style contains {49} expressions of Greek, Hebrew, and German origin; that the testimony of numismatics is against it; and that the author knew nothing of the antiquities of Rome, into whose council he introduced satraps. Valla's work was so thoroughly done that the document, embodied as were its conclusions in the Canon Law, has never found a reputable defender since. In time the critique had an immense effect. Ulrich von Hutten published it in 1517, and in the same year an English translation was made. In 1537 Luther turned it into German.
[Sidenote: Valla attacks the Pope]
And if the legality of the pope's rule was so slight, what was its practical effect? According to Valla, it was a "barbarous, overbearing, tyrannical, priestly domination." "What is it to you," he apostrophizes the pontiff, "if our republic is crushed? You have crushed it. If our temples have been pillaged? You have pillaged them. If our virgins and matrons have been violated? You have done it. If the city is innundated with the blood of citizens? You are guilty of it all."
[Sidenote: Annotations on the New Testament]
Valla's critical genius next attacked the schoolman's idol Aristotle and the humanist's demigod Cicero. More important were hisAnnotations on the New Testament, first published by Erasmus in 1505. The Vulgate was at that time regarded, as it was at Trent defined to be, the authentic or official form of the Scriptures. Taking in hand three Latin and three Greek manuscripts, Valla had no difficulty in showing that they differed from one another and that in some cases the Latin had no authority whatever in the Greek. He pointed out a number of mistranslations, some of them in passages vitally affecting the faith. In short he left no support standing for any theory of verbal inspiration. He further questioned, and successfully, the authorship of the Creed attributed {50} to the Apostles, the authenticity of the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite and of the letter of Christ to King Abgarus, preserved and credited by Eusebius.
[Sidenote: Attack on Christian ethics]
His attack on Christian ethics was still more fundamental. In hisDialogue on Free Willhe tried with ingenuity to reconcile the freedom of the will, denied by Augustine, with the foreknowledge of God, which he did not feel strong enough to dispute. In his work onThe Monastic Lifehe denied all value to asceticism. Others had mocked the monks for not living up to their professions; he asserted that the ideal itself was mistaken. But it is the treatiseOn Pleasurethat goes the farthest. In form it is a dialogue on ethics; one interlocutor maintaining the Epicurean, the second the Stoical, and the third the Christian standard. The sympathies of the author are plainly with the champion of hedonism, who maintains that pleasure is the supreme good in life, or rather the only good, that the prostitute is better than the nun, for the one makes men happy, the other is dedicated to a painful and shameful celibacy; that the law against adultery is a sort of sacrilege; that women should be common and should go naked; and that it is irrational to die for one's country or for any other ideal. . . . It is noteworthy that the representative of the Christian standpoint accepts tacitly the assumption that happiness is the supreme good, only he places that happiness in the next life.
Valla's ideas obtained throughout a large circle in the half-century following his death. Masuccio indulged in the most obscene mockery of Catholic rites. Poggio wrote a book against hypocrites, attacking the monks, and a joke-book largely at the expense of the faithful. Machiavelli assailed the papacy with great ferocity, attributing to it the corruption of Italian morals and the political disunion and weakness of {51} Italy, and advocating its annihilation. [Sidenote: Machiavelli, 1469-1530] In place of Christianity, habitually spoken of as an exploded superstition, dangerous to the state, he would put the patriotic cults of antiquity.
It is not strange, knowing the character of the popes, that pagan expressions should color the writings of their courtiers. Poggio was a papal secretary, and so was Bembo, a cardinal who refused to read Paul's epistles for fear of corrupting his Latinity. In his exquisite search for classical equivalents for the rude phrases of the gospel, he referred, in a papal breve, to Christ as "Minerva sprung from the head of Jove," and to the Holy Ghost as "the breath of the celestial Zephyr." Conceived in the same spirit was a sermon of Inghirami heard by Erasmus at Rome on Good Friday 1509. Couched in the purest Ciceronian terms, while comparing the Saviour to Gurtius, Cecrops, Aristides, Epaminondas and Iphigenia, it was mainly devoted to an extravagant eulogy of the reigning pontiff, Julius II.
But all the Italian humanists were not pagans. There arose at Florence, partly under the influence of the revival of Greek, partly under that of Savonarola, a group of earnest young men who sought to invigorate Christianity by infusing into it the doctrines of Plato. The leaders of this Neo-Platonic Academy, Pico della Mirandola [Sidenote: Pico della Mirandola, 1462-94] and Marsiglio Ficino, sought to show that the teachings of the Athenian and of the Galilean were the same. Approaching the Bible in the simple literary way indicated by classical study, Pico really rediscovered some of the teachings of the New Testament, while in dealing with the Old he was forced to adopt an ingenious but unsound allegorical interpretation. "Philosophy seeks the truth," he wrote, "theology finds it, religion possesses it." His extraordinary personal influence extended through {52} lands beyond the Alps, even though it failed in accomplishing the rehabilitation of Italian faith.
[Sidenote: Faber Stapulensis, c. 1455-1536]
The leader of the French Christian Renaissance, James Lefèvre d'Étaples, was one of his disciples. Traveling in Italy in 1492, after visiting Padua, Venice and Rome, he came to Florence, learned to know Pico, and received from him a translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics made by Cardinal Bessarion. Returning to Paris he taught, at the College of Cardinal Lemoine, mathematics, music and philosophy. He did not share the dislike of Aristotle manifested by most of the humanists, for he shrewdly suspected that what was offensive in the Stagyrite was due more to his scholastic translators and commentators than to himself. He therefore labored to restore the true text, on which he wrote a number of treatises. It was with the same purpose that he turned next to the early Fathers and to the writer called Dionysius the Areopagite. But he did not find himself until he found the Bible. In 1509 he published theQuintuplex Psalterium, the first treatise on the Psalms in which the philological and personal interest was uppermost. Hitherto it had not been the Bible that had been studied so much as the commentaries on it, a dry wilderness of arid and futile subtlety. Lefèvre tried to see simply what the text said, and as it became more human it became, for him, more divine. His preface is a real cry of joy at his great discovery. He did, indeed, interpret everything in a double sense, literal and spiritual, and placed the emphasis rather on the latter, but this did not prevent a genuine effort to read the words as they were written. Three years later he published in like manner the Epistles of St. Paul, with commentary. Though he spoke of the apostle as a simple instrument of God, he yet did more to uncover his personality than any of the previous {53} commentators. Half mystic as he was, Lefèvre discovered in Paul the doctrine of justification by faith only. To I Corinthians viii, he wrote: "It is almost profane to speak of the merit of works, especially towards God. . . . The opinion that we can be justified by works is an error for which the Jews are especially condemned. . . . Our only hope is in God's grace." Lefèvre's works opened up a new world to the theologians of the time. Erasmus's friend Beatus Rhenanus wrote that the richness of theQuintuplex Psaltermade him poor. Thomas More said that English students owed him much. Luther used the two works of the Frenchman as the texts for his early lectures. From them he drew very heavily; indeed it was doubtless Lefèvre who first suggested to him the formula of his famous "sola fide."
The religious renaissance in England was led by a disciple of Pico della Mirandola, John Colet, [Sidenote: Colet, d. 1519] a man of remarkably pure life, and Dean of St. Paul's. He wrote, though he did not publish, some commentaries on the Pauline epistles and on the Mosaic account of creation. Though he knew no Greek, and was not an easy or elegant writer of Latin, he was allied to the humanists by his desire to return to the real sources of Christianity, and by his search for the historical sense of his texts. Though in some respects he was under the fantastic notions of the Areopagite, in others his interpretation was rational, free and undogmatic. He exercised a considerable influence on Erasmus and on a few choice spirits of the time.
The humanism of Germany centered in the universities. At the close of the fifteenth century new courses in the Latin classics, in Greek and in Hebrew, began to supplement the medieval curriculum of logic and philosophy. At every academy there sprang up a circle of "poets," as they called themselves, often of {54} lax morals and indifferent to religion, but earnest in their championship of culture. Nor were these circles confined entirely to the seats of learning. Many a city had its own literary society, one of the most famous being that of Nuremberg. Conrad Mutianus Rufus drew to Gotha, [Sidenote: Mutian, 1471-1526] where he held a canonry, a group of disciples, to whom he imparted the Neo-Platonism he had imbibed in Italy. Disregarding revelation, he taught that all religions were essentially the same. "I esteem the decrees of philosophers more than those of priests," he wrote.
[Sidenote: Reuchlin, 1455-1522]
What Lefèvre and Colet had done for the New Testament, John Reuchlin did for the Old. After studying in France and Italy, where he learned to know Pico della Mirandola, he settled at Stuttgart and devoted his life to the study of Hebrew. HisDe Rudimentis Hebraicis, [Sidenote: 1506] a grammar and dictionary of this language, performed a great service for scholarship. In the late Jewish work, theCabbala, he believed he had discovered a source of mystic wisdom. The extravagance of his interpretations of Scriptual passages, based on this, not only rendered much of his work nugatory, but got him into a great deal of trouble. The converted Jew, John Pfefferkorn, proposed, in a series of pamphlets, that Jews should be forbidden to practise usury, should be compelled to hear sermons and to deliver up all their Hebrew books to be burnt, except the Old Testament. When Reuchlin's aid in this pious project was requested it was refused in a memorial dated October 6, 1510, pointing out the great value of much Hebrew literature. The Dominicans of Cologne, headed by their inquisitor, James Hochstraten, made this the ground for a charge of heresy. The case was appealed to Rome, and the trial, lasting six years, excited the interest of all Europe. In Germany it was argued with much heat in a host of {55} pamphlets, all the monks and obscurantists taking the side of the inquisitors and all the humanists, save one, Ortuin Gratius of Cologne, taking the part of the scholar. The latter received many warm expressions of admiration and support from the leading writers of the time, and published them in two volumes, the first in 1514, under the titleLetters of Eminent Men. It was this that suggested to the humanist, Crotus Bubeanus, the title of his satire published anonymously,The Letters of Obscure Men. In form it is a series of epistles from monks and hedge-priests to Ortuin Gratius. [Sidenote:Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum]
Writing in the most barbarous Latin, they express their admiration for his attack on Reuchlin and the cause of learning, gossip about their drinking-bouts and pot-house amours, expose their ignorance and gullibility, and ask absurd questions, as, whether it is a mortal sin to salute a Jew, and whether the worms eaten with beans and cheese should be considered meat or fish, lawful or not in Lent, and at what stage of development a chick in the egg becomes meat and therefore prohibited on Fridays. The satire, coarse as it was biting, failed to win the applause of the finer spirits, but raised a shout of laughter from the students, and was no insignificant factor in adding to contempt for the church. The first book of theseLetters, published in 1515, was followed two years later by a second, even more caustic than the first. This supplement, also published without the writer's name, was from the pen of Ulrich von Hutten.
[Sidenote: Hutten, 1488-1523]
This brilliant and passionate writer devoted the greater part of his life to war with Rome. His motive was not religious, but patriotic. He longed to see his country strong and united, and free from the galling oppression of the ultramontane yoke. He published Valla'sDonation of Constantine, and wrote epigrams on the popes. His dialogueFever the Firstis a {56} vitriolic attack on the priests. HisVadiscus or the Roman Trinity[Sidenote: 1520] scourges the vices of the curia where three things are sold: Christ, places and women. When he first heard of Luther's cause he called it a quarrel of monks, and only hoped they would all destroy one another. But by 1519 he saw in the Reformer the most powerful of allies against the common foe, and he accordingly embraced his cause with habitual zeal. His letters at this time breathe out fire and slaughter against the Romanists if anything should happen to Luther. In 1523, he supported his friend Francis von Sickingen, in the attempt to assert by force of arms the rights of the patriotic and evangelic order of knights. When this was defeated, Hutten, suffering from a terrible disease, wandered to Switzerland, where he died, a lonely and broken exile. His epitaph shall be his own lofty poem:
I have fought my fight with courage,Nor have I aught to rue,For, though I lost the battle,The world knows, I was true!
[Sidenote: Erasmus, 1466-1536]
The most cosmopolitan, as well as the greatest, of all the Christian humanists, was Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. Though an illegitimate child, he was well educated and thoroughly grounded in the classics at the famous school of Deventer. At the age of twenty he was persuaded, somewhat against his will, to enter the order of Augustinian Canons at Steyn. Under the patronage of the Bishop of Cambrai he was enabled to continue his studies at Paris. [Sidenote: 1499-1509] For the next ten years he wandered to England, to various places in Northern France and Flanders, and Italy, learning to know many of the intellectual leaders of the time. From 1509-14 he was in England, part of the time lecturing at Cambridge. He then spent some {57} years at Louvain, seven years at Basle and six years at Freiburg in the Breisgau, returning to Basle for the last year of his life.
Until he was over thirty Erasmus's dominant interest was classical literature. Under the influence of Colet and of a French Franciscan, John Vitrier, he turned his attention to liberalizing religion. His first devotional work,The Handbook of the Christian Knight, perfectly sets forth his program of spiritual, as opposed to formal, Christianity. [Sidenote:Enchiridion Militis Christiani, 1503] It all turns upon the distinction between the inner and the outer man, the moral and the sensual. True service of Christ is purity of heart and love, not the invocation of saints, fasting and indulgences.
InThe Praise of FollyErasmus mildly rebukes the foibles of men. [Sidenote: 1511] There never was kindlier satire, free from the savage scorn of Crotus and Hutten, and from the didactic scolding of Sebastian Brant, whoseShip of Fools[Sidenote: 1494] was one of the author's models. Folly is made quite amiable, the source not only of some things that are amiss but also of much harmless enjoyment. The besetting silliness of every class is exposed: of the man of pleasure, of the man of business, of women and of husbands, of the writer and of the pedant. Though not unduly emphasized, the folly of current superstitions is held up to ridicule. Some there are who have turned the saints into pagan gods; some who have measured purgatory into years and days and cheat themselves with indulgences against it; some theologians who spend all their time discussing such absurdities as whether God could have redeemed men in the form of a woman, a devil, an ass, a squash or a stone, others who explain the mystery of the Trinity.
In following up his plan for the restoration of a simpler Christianity, Erasmus rightly thought that a return from the barren subtleties of the schoolmen to {58} the primitive sources was essential. He wished to reduce Christianity to a moral, humanitarian, undogmatic philosophy of life. His attitude towards dogma was to admit it and to ignore it. Scientific enlightenment he welcomed more than did either the Catholics or the Reformers, sure that if the Sermon on the Mount survived, Christianity had nothing to fear. In like manner, while he did not attack the cult and ritual of the church, he never laid any stress on it. "If some dogmas are incomprehensible and some rites superstitious," he seemed to say, "what does it matter? Let us emphasize the ethical and spiritual content of Christ's message, for if we seek his kingdom, all else needful shall be added unto us." His favorite name for his religion was the "philosophy of Christ," [Sidenote: Philosophy of Christ] and it is thus that he persuasively expounds it in a note, in his Greek Testament, to Matthew xi, 30:
Truly the yoke of Christ would be sweet and his burden light, if petty human institutions added nothing to what he himself imposed. He commanded us nothing save love one for another, and there is nothing so bitter that charity does not soften and sweeten it. Everything according to nature is easily borne, and nothing accords better with the nature of man than the philosophy of Christ, of which almost the sole end is to give back to fallen nature its innocence and integrity. . . . How pure, how simple is the faith that Christ delivered to us! How close to it is the creed transmitted to us by the apostles, or apostolic men. The church, divided and tormented by discussions and by heresy, added to it many things, of which some can be omitted without prejudice to the faith. . . . There are many opinions from which impiety may be begotten, as for example, all those philosophic doctrines on the reason of the nature and the distinction of the persons of the Godhead. . . . The sacraments themselves were instituted for the salvation of men, but we abuse them for lucre, for vain glory or for the oppression of the humble. . . . What rules, what superstitions we have about vestments! How many are judged as to {59} their Christianity by such trifles, which are indifferent in themselves, which change with the fashion and of which Christ never spoke! . . . How many fasts are instituted! And we are not merely invited to fast, but obliged to, on pain of damnation. . . . What shall we say about vows . . . about the authority of the pope, the abuse of absolutions, dispensations, remissions of penalty, law-suits, in which there is much that a truly good man cannot see without a groan? The priests themselves prefer to study Aristotle than to ply their ministry. The gospel is hardly mentioned from the pulpit. Sermons are monopolized by the commissioners of indulgences; often the doctrine of Christ is put aside and suppressed for their profit. . . . Would that men were content to let Christ rule by the laws of the gospel and that they would no longer seek to strengthen their obscurant tyranny by human decrees!
[Sidenote: Colloquies]
In theFamiliar Colloquies, first published in 1518 and often enlarged in subsequent editions, Erasmus brought out his religious ideas most sharply. Enormous as were the sales and influence of his other chief writings, they were probably less than those of this work, intended primarily as a text-book of Latin style. The first conversations are, indeed, nothing more than school-boy exercises, but the later ones are short stories penned with consummate art. Erasmus is almost the only man who, since the fall of Rome, has succeeded in writing a really exquisite Latin. But his supreme gift was his dry wit, the subtle faculty of exposing an object, apparently by a simple matter-of-fact narrative, to the keenest ridicule. Thus, in theColloquies, he describes his pilgrimage to St. Thomas's shrine at Canterbury, the bloody bones and the handkerchief covered with the saint's rheum offered to be kissed—all without a disapproving word and yet in such a way that when the reader has finished it he wonders how anything so silly could ever have existed. Thus again he strips the worship of Mary, and all the {60} stupid and wrong projects she is asked to abet. In the conversation calledThe Shipwreck, the people pray to the Star of the Sea exactly as they did in pagan times, only it is Mary, not Venus that is meant. They offer mountains of wax candles to the saints to preserve them, although one man confides to his neighbor in a whisper that if he ever gets to land he will not pay one penny taper on his vow. Again, in theColloquy on the New Testament, a young man is asked what he has done for Christ. He replies:
A certain Franciscan keeps reviling the New Testament of Erasmus in his sermons. Well, one day I called on him in private, seized him by the hair with my left hand and punished him with my right. I gave him so sound a drubbing that I reduced his whole face to a mere jelly. What do you say to that? Isn't that maintaining the gospel? And then, by way of absolution for his sins I took this book [Erasmus's New Testament, a folio bound with brass] and gave him three resounding whacks on the head in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.
"That," replies his friend, "was truly evangelic; defending the gospel by the gospel. But really it is time you were turning from a brute beast into a man."
So it was that the man who was at once the gentlest Christian, the leading scholar, and the keenest wit of his age insinuated his opinions without seeming to attack anything. Where Luther battered down, he undermined. [Sidenote: Methods of argument] Even when he argued against an opinion he called his polemic a "Conversation"—for that is the true meaning of the word Diatribe. With choice of soft vocabulary, of attenuated forms, of double negatives, he tempered exquisitely his Latin. Did he doubt anything? Hardly, "he had a shade of doubt" (subdubito). Did he think he wrote well? Not at all, but he confessed that he produced "something more like Latin than the average" (paulo latinius). Did he {61} like anything? If so, he only admitted—except when he was addressing his patrons—"that he was not altogether averse to it." But all at once from these feather-light touches, like those of a Henry James, comes the sudden thrust that made his stylus a dagger. Some of his epigrams on the Reformation have been quoted in practically every history of the subject since, and will be quoted as often again.
[Sidenote: His wit]
But it was not a few perfect phrases that made him the power that he was, but an habitual wit that never failed to strip any situation of its vulgar pretense. When a canon of Strassburg Cathedral was showing him over the chapter house and was boasting of the rule that no one should be admitted to a prebend who had not sixteen quarterings on his coat of arms, the humanist dropped his eyes and remarked demurely, with but the flicker of a smile, that he was indeed honored to be in a religious company so noble that even Jesus could not have come up to its requirements. The man was dumfounded, he almost suspected something personal; but he never forgot the salutary lesson so delicately conveyed.
Erasmus was a man of peace; he feared "the tumult" which, if we trust a letter dated September 9, 1517—though he sometimes retouched his letters on publishing them—he foresaw. "In this part of the world," he wrote, "I am afraid that a great revolution is impending." It was already knocking at the door!
{62}
It is superfluous in these days to point out that no great historical movement is caused by the personality, however potent, of a single individual. The men who take the helm at crises are those who but express in themselves what the masses of their followers feel. The need of leadership is so urgent that if there is no really great man at hand, the people will invent one, endowing the best of the small men with the prestige of power, and embodying in his person the cause for which they strive. But a really strong personality to some extent guides the course of events by which he is carried along. Such a man was Luther. [Sidenote: Luther, 1483-1546] Few have ever alike represented and dominated an age as did he. His heart was the most passionately earnest, his will the strongest, his brain one of the most capacious of his time; above all he had the gift of popular speech to stamp his ideas into the fibre of his countrymen. If we may borrow a figure from chemistry, he found public opinion a solution supersaturated with revolt; all that was needed to precipitate it was a pebble thrown in, but instead of a pebble he added the most powerful reagent possible.
On that October day when Columbus discovered the new world, Martin, a boy of very nearly nine, was sitting at his desk in the school at Mansfeld. Though both diligent and quick, he found the crabbed Latin primer, itself written in abstract Latin, very difficult, and was flogged fourteen times in one morning by {63} brutal masters for faltering in a declension. When he returned home he found his mother bending under a load of wood she had gathered in the forest. Both she and his father were severe with the children, whipping them for slight faults until the blood came. Nevertheless, as the son himself recognized, they meant heartily well by it. But for the self-sacrifice and determination shown by the father, a worker in the newly opened mines, who by his own industry rose to modest comfort, the career of the son would have been impossible.
Fully as much as by bodily hardship the boy's life was rendered unhappy by spiritual terrors. Demons lurked in the storms, and witches plagued his good mother and threatened to make her children cry themselves to death. God and Christ were conceived as stern and angry judges ready to thrust sinners into hell. "They painted Christ," says Luther—and such pictures can still be seen in old churches—"sitting on a rainbow with his Mother and John the Baptist on either side as intercessors against his frightful wrath."
At thirteen he was sent away to Magdeburg to a charitable school, and the next year to Eisenach, where he spent three years in study. He contributed to his support by the then recognized means of begging, and was sheltered by the pious matron Ursula Cotta. In 1501 he matriculated at the old and famous university of Erfurt. [Sidenote: Erfurt] The curriculum here consisted of logic, dialectic, grammar, and rhetoric, followed by arithmetic, ethics, and metaphysics. There was some natural science, studied not by the experimental method, but wholly from the books of Aristotle and his medieval commentators, and there were also a few courses in literature, both in the Latin classics and in their later imitators. Ranking among the better {64} scholars Luther took the degrees of bachelor in 1502 and of master of arts in 1505, and immediately began the study of jurisprudence. While his diligence and good conduct won golden words from his preceptors he mingled with his comrades as a man with men. He was generous, even prodigal, a musician and a "philosopher"; in disputations he was made "an honorary umpire" by his fellows and teachers. "Fair fortune and good health are mine," he wrote a friend on September 5, 1501, "I am settled at college as pleasantly as possible."
For the sudden change that came over his life at the age of twenty-one no adequate explanation has been offered. Pious and serious as he was, his thoughts do not seem to have turned towards the monastic life as a boy, nor are the old legends of the sudden death of a friend well substantiated. As he was returning to Erfurt from a visit home, he was overtaken by a terrific thunderstorm, in which his excited imagination saw a devine warning to forsake the "world." In a fright he vowed to St. Ann to become a monk and, though he at once regretted the rash promise, on July 17, 1505, he discharged it by entering the Augustinian friary at Erfurt. After a year's novitiate he took the irrevocable vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. In 1507 he was ordained priest. In the winter of 1510-1 he was sent to Rome on business of the order, and there saw much of the splendor and also of the corruption of the capital of Christendom. Having started, in 1508, to teach Aristotle at the recently founded University of Wittenberg, a year later he returned to Erfurt, but was again called to Wittenberg to lecture on the Bible, a position he held all his life. [Sidenote: 1511]
During his first ten years in the cloister he underwent a profound experience. He started with the horrible and torturing idea that he was doomed to hell. {65} "What can I do," he kept asking, "to win a gracious God?" The answer given him by his teachers was that a man must work out his own salvation, not entirely, but largely, by his own efforts. The sacraments of the church dispensed grace and life to the recipient, and beyond this he could merit forgiveness by the asceticism and privation of the monastic life. Luther took this all in and strove frantically by fasting, prayer, and scourging to fit himself for redemption. But though he won the reputation of a saint, he could not free himself from the desires of the flesh. He was helpless; he could do nothing. Then he read in Augustine that virtue without grace is but a specious vice; that God damns and saves utterly without regard to man's work. He read in Tauler and the other mystics that the only true salvation is union with God, and that if a man were willing to be damned for God's glory he would find heaven even in hell. He read in Lefèvre d'Étaples that a man is not saved by doing good, but by faith, like the thief on the cross.
In May, 1515, he began to lecture on Paul's Epistles to the Romans, and pondered the verse (i, 17) "The just shall live by his faith." [Sidenote: Justification by faith only] All at once, so forcibly that he believed it a revelation of the Holy Ghost, the thought dawned upon him that whereas man was impotent to do or be good, God was able freely to make him so. Pure passivity in God's hands, simple abandonment to his will was the only way of salvation; not by works but by faith in the Redeemer was man sanctified. The thought, though by no means new in Christianity, was, in the application he gave it, the germ of the religious revolution. In it was contained the total repudiation of the medieval ecclesiastical system of salvation by sacrament and by the good works of the cloister. To us nowadays the thought seems remote; the question which called it forth outworn. But to the {66} sixteenth century it was as intensely practical as social reform is now; the church was everywhere with her claim to rule over men's daily lives and over their souls. All progress was conditioned on breaking her claims, and probably nothing could have done it so thoroughly as this idea of justification by faith only.
The thought made Luther a reformer at once. He started to purge his order of Pharisaism, and the university of the dross of Aristotle. Soon he was called upon to protest against one of the most obtrusive of the "good works" recommended by the church, the purchase of indulgences. Albert of Hohenzollern was elected, through political influence and at an early age, to the archiepiscopal sees of Magdeburg and Mayence, this last carrying with it an electorate and the primacy of Germany. For confirmation from the pope in the uncanonical occupation of these offices, Albert paid a huge sum, the equivalent of several hundred thousand dollars today. Mayence was already in debt and the young archbishop knew not where to turn for money. To help him, and to raise money for Rome, Leo X declared an indulgence. In order to get a large a profit as possible Albert employed as his chief agent an unscrupulous Dominican named John Tetzel. [Sidenote: Tetzel] This man went around the country proclaiming that as soon as the money clinked in the chest the soul of some dead relative flew from purgatory, and that by buying a papal pardon the purchaser secured plenary remission of sins and the grace of God.
The indulgence-sellers were forbidden to enter Saxony, but they came very near it, and many of the people of Wittenberg went out to buy heaven at a bargain. Luther was sickened by seeing what he believed to be the deception of the poor people in being taught to rely on these wretched papers instead of on real, lively faith. He accordingly called their value in question, {67} in Ninety-five Theses, or heads for a scholastic debate, which he nailed to the door of the Castle Church on October 31, 1517. [Sidenote: The Ninety-five Theses, 1517] He pointed out that the doctrine of the church was very uncertain, especially in regard to the freeing of souls from purgatory; that contrition was the only gate to God's pardon; that works of charity were better than buying of indulgences, and that the practices of the indulgence-sellers were extremely scandalous and likely to foment heresy among the simple. In all this he did not directly deny the whole value of indulgences, but he pared it down to a minimum.
The Theses were printed by Luther and sent around to friends in other cities. They were at once put into German, and applauded to the echo by the whole nation. Everybody had been resentful of the extortion of greedy ecclesiastics and disgusted with their hypocrisy. All welcomed the attack on the "holy trade," as its supporters called it. Tetzel was mobbed and had to withdraw in haste. The pardons no longer had any sale. The authorities took alarm at once. Leo X directed the general of the Augustinians to make his presumptuous brother recant. [Sidenote: February 3, 1518] The matter was accordingly brought up at the general chapter of the Order held at Heidelberg in May. Luther was present, was asked to retract, and refused. On the contrary he published a Sermon on Indulgence and Grace and a defence of the theses stating his points more strongly than before.
The whole of Germany was now in commotion. The Diet which met at Augsburg in the summer of 1518 was extremely hostile to the pope and to his legate, Cardinal Cajetan. At the instance of this theologian, who had written a reply to the Theses, and of the Dominicans, wounded in the person of Tetzel, Luther was summoned to Rome to be tried. On August 5 the {68} Emperor Maximilian promised his aid to the pope, and in order to expedite matters, the latter changed the summons to Rome to a citation before Cajetan at Augsburg, at the same time instructing the legate to seize the heretic if he did not recant. At this juncture Luther was not left in the lurch by his own sovereign, Frederic the Wise, Elector of Saxony, through whom an imperial safe-conduct was procured. Armed with this, the Wittenberg professor appeared before Cajetan at Augsburg, was asked to recant two of his statements on indulgences, and refused. [Sidenote: October 12-14, 1518] A few days later Luther drew up an appeal "from the pope badly informed to the pope to be better informed," and in the following month appealed again from the pope to a future oecumenical council. In the meantime Leo X, in the bullCum postquam, authoritatively defined the doctrine of indulgences in a sense contrary to the position of Luther.
The next move of the Vicar of Christ was to send to Germany a special agent, the Saxon Charles von Miltitz, with instructions either to cajole the heretic into retraction or the Elector into surrendering him. In neither of these attempts was he successful. [Sidenote: January 1519] At an interview with Luther the utmost he could do was to secure a general statement that the accused man would abide by the decision of the Holy See, and a promise to keep quiet as long as his opponents did the same.
Such a compromise was sure to be fruitless, for the champions of the church could not let the heretic rest for a moment. The whole affair was given a wider publicity than it had hitherto attained, and at the same time Luther was pushed to a more advanced position than he had yet reached, by the attack of a theologian of Ingolstadt, John Eck. When he assailed the Theses on the ground that they seriously impaired the authority of the Roman see, Luther retorted:
{69} The assertion that the Roman Church is superior to all other churches is proved only by weak and vain papal decrees of the last four hundred years, and is repugnant to the accredited history of the previous eleven hundred years, to the Bible, and to the decree of the holiest of all councils, the Nicene.
[Sidenote: The Leipzig Debate, 1519]
A debate on this and other propositions between Eck on the one side and Luther and his colleague Carlstadt on the other took place at Leipzig in the days from June 27 to July 16, 1519. The climax of the argument on the power of popes and councils came when Eck, skilfully manoeuvring to show that Luther's opinions were identical with those of Huss, forced from his opponent the bold declaration that "among the opinions of John Huss and the Bohemians many are certainly most Christian and evangelic, and cannot be condemned by the universal church." The words sent a thrill through the audience and throughout Christendom. Eck could only reply: "If you believe that a general council, legitimately convoked, can err, you are to me a heathen and a publican." Reconciliation was indeed no longer possible. When Luther had protested against the abuse of indulgences he did so as a loyal son of the church. Now at last he was forced to raise the standard of revolt, at least against Rome, the recognized head of the church. He had begun by appealing from indulgence-seller to pope, then from the pope to a universal council; now he declared that a great council had erred, and that he would not abide by its decision. The issue was a clear one, though hardly recognized as such by himself, between the religion of authority and the right of private judgment.
His opposition to the papacy developed with extraordinary rapidity. His study of the Canon Law made him, as early as March, 1519, brand the pope as either Antichrist or Antichrist's apostle. He {70} applauded Melancthon, a brilliant young man called to teach at Wittenberg in 1518, for denying transubstantiation. He declared that the cup should never have been withheld from the laity, and that the mass considered as a good work and a sacrifice was an abomination. His eyes were opened to the iniquities of Rome by Valla's exposure of the Donation of Constantine, published by Ulrich von Hutten in 1519. After reading it he wrote:
Good heavens! what darkness and wickedness is at Rome! You wonder at the judgment of God that such unauthentic, crass, impudent lies not only lived but prevailed for many centuries, that they were incorporated into the Canon Law, and (that no degree of horror might be wanting) that they became as articles of faith.
Like German troops Luther was best in taking the offensive. These early years when he was standing almost alone and attacking one abuse after another, were the finest of his whole career. Later, when he came to reconstruct a church, he modified or withdrew much of what he had at first put forward, and re-introduced a large portion of the medieval religiosity which he had once so successfully and fiercely attacked. The year 1520 saw him at the most advanced point he ever attained. It was then that he produced, with marvellous fecundity, a series of pamphlets unequalled by him and unexcelled anywhere, both in the incisive power of their attack on existing institutions and in the popular force of their language.
[Sidenote:To the Christian Nobility, 1520]
His greatest appeal to his countrymen was made in hisAddress to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation on the Improvement of the Christian Estate. In this he asserts the right of the civil power to reform the spiritual, and urges the government to exercise this right. The priests, says he, defend themselves against all outside interference by three "walls," of {71} which the first is the claim that the church is superior to the state, in case the civil authority presses them; the second, the assertion, if one would correct them by the Bible, that no one can interpret it but the pope; the third, if they are threatened with a general council, the contention that no one can convoke such a council save the pope. Luther demolishes these walls with words of vast import. First, he denies any distinction between the spiritual and temporal estates. Every baptized Christian, he asserts, is a priest, and in this saying he struck a mortal blow at the great hierarchy of privilege and theocratic tyranny built up by the Middle Ages. The second wall is still frailer than the first, says the writer, for anyone can see that in spite of the priests' claims to be masters of the Bible they never learn one word of it their whole life long. The third wall falls of itself, for the Bible plainly commands everyone to punish and correct any wrong-doer, no matter what his station.
[Sidenote: Reform measures]
After this introduction Luther proposes measures of reform equally drastic and comprehensive. The first twelve articles are devoted to the pope, the annates, the appointment of foreigners to German benefices, the appeal of cases to Rome, the asserted authority of the papacy over bishops, the emperor, and other rulers. All these abuses, as well as jubilees and pilgrimages to Rome should be simply forbidden by the civil government. The next three articles deal with sacerdotal celibacy, recommending that priests be allowed to marry, and calling for the suppression of many of the cloisters. It is further urged that foundations for masses and for the support of idle priests be abolished, that various vexatious provisions of the Canon Law be repealed, and that begging on any pretext be prohibited. The twenty-fourth article deals with the Bohemian schism, saying that Huss was wrongly {72} burned, and calling for union with the Hussites who deny transubstantiation and demand the cup for the laity. Next, the writer takes up the reform of education in the interests of a more biblical religion. Finally, he urges that sumptuary laws be passed, that a bridle be put in the mouth of the great monopolists and usurers, and that brothels be no longer tolerated.