Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie

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СКАЧАТЬ suggested he adopt the Renaissance fashion of translating his name into Greek. In 1518, Reuchlin also secured the job of professor of Greek at Wittenberg for his nephew. Luther was immediately in awe of Melanchthon, who, at only twenty-one, was thirteen years his junior. He claimed that he had never written a book as good as Melanchthon’s Commonplaces, published in 1521. It was Melanchthon who fashioned Luther’s vivid, chaotic theological insights into a coherent system. But while the two men were always close, Luther’s faith in his younger colleague was shaken during his confinement in 1521–22. Melanchthon had not kept a grip on Wittenberg. Where Luther was immovably stubborn, Melanchthon was calm and reasonable – to the point, his enemies muttered, of timidity. Luther compared their respective styles by saying that Melanchthon pricked their enemies with pins, while he himself stabbed them with pikes.²²

      If Melanchthon was timid, others in Wittenberg had the opposite problem. After Luther’s condemnation at Worms, some of his fellow-travellers began to take matters into their own hands. In September 1521, Luther’s fellow Augustinian monks changed the way they were celebrating the Catholic Mass, the most prominent daily symbol of the theology they now questioned, eventually rewriting the service in German rather than Latin. Some began to abandon their cloisters. In January 1522, the university’s chancellor, Andreas Karlstadt, even got married, in defiance of the long-standing Catholic requirement that clergy remain celibate.

      A nervous Elector Frederick called for restraint, but these new radicals were only just beginning. In December 1521, three men from the mining town of Zwickau arrived in Wittenberg: a former student and two weavers. They claimed that God had called them to be prophets, predicted the imminent end of the world, and demanded further dramatic reforms. In particular, they criticized the practice of baptizing infants, which, as they rightly said, has no direct biblical basis. Meanwhile, Karlstadt and his allies were demanding the destruction of Catholic images, altars, and relics in the town’s churches, so as to “cleanse” the buildings of idolatry and fit them for reformed worship. This was controversial in itself, but when the elector forbade it and some of the more excitable townsfolk started smashing images on their own initiative, it looked less like holiness and more like rioting.²³

      Luther was horrified. Partly this was because, for all his spiritual radicalism, he was deeply socially conservative. His instinct was to obey rightful authorities, to respect social hierarchies, and to preserve good order. For him, Christian freedom meant inner liberation, not political upheaval. He had defied established authorities, but he was a professor and had in any case been called by God. Self-appointed prophets like the Zwickauers and the iconoclasts had no excuse.

      More significantly, Luther hated these impatient reformers’ ideas. He wanted to set Christians free from rules and laws, but Karlstadt and the Zwickauers were burdening Christian consciences with new rules about baptism and images. They had missed the point. Luther wanted not to replace bad laws with good ones but to lift believers above the realm of law altogether, into the light of the Gospel of love. For him, these law-mongers were Schwärmer, “fanatics”. It was a capacious category, which expanded over the coming decades to include almost everyone Luther disagreed with.

      So in March 1522, Luther decided to risk returning to Wittenberg to take charge. Symbolically, he arrived in his monk’s habit, shaved and tonsured. For a time, it worked. Karlstadt was reined in and then exiled to an obscure country parish. Luther’s success in whipping his recalcitrant colleagues into line only confirmed his sense of his unique calling.

      Yet while Luther could impose order on one town, the wider movement he had sparked was now beyond anyone’s control. The early 1520s in Germany were revolutionary years. Priests, printers, peddlers, even (shockingly) women could all make themselves heard. In a ruthless, scurrilous and almost ungovernable book market, talent rose rapidly to the top. Between 1518 and 1525, fifty-one editions of anti-Catholic works by a Nuremberg shoemaker, Hans Sachs, were published in Germany: not far off Philip Melanchthon’s total of seventy-one. In parts of Germany’s jurisdictional patchwork, reformist preaching and printing were banned, but preachers were hard to keep out, and books almost impossible. Those cities where the reformers found support were confronted with Wittenberg’s dilemma: How was this Reformation actually to be implemented? By the time Luther himself finally abandoned his monk’s guise, sealed his departure from the vowed life by marrying a former nun, and promulgated a German order for the Mass, he was scrambling to catch up with a splintering, restless, hydra-headed movement, offering a hundred different local Reformations in the name of the same Gospel.

The Fanatics’ Reformation

      With hindsight, we can see three broad strands of reform emerging from this chaos. One strand looked directly to Luther, with his appealing blend of spiritual radicalism and social conservatism. The other two strands were less unified. One, rooted in Switzerland and southern Germany, looked primarily to Huldrych Zwingli, the city preacher of Zurich, and several other loosely allied leaders; we will come back to them in chapter 3. The final strand was even more fractious. It lacked shared leaders, origins or doctrines. What united it was a mood, a radically impatient determination to take Luther’s insights about the futility of the old ways and to press them to their extremes. Karlstadt belonged to this radical strand. So too did Thomas Müntzer, a former pastor in Zwickau who became notorious after he was blamed for burning down a shrine to the Virgin Mary in March 1524. That summer, he publicly demanded that the princes of Saxony take up arms on the reformers’ behalf. Luther denounced him as another fanatic.

      Müntzer was starting to ride something bigger than he could control. It is still unclear quite how the religious turmoil that Luther had unleashed was connected to the German Peasants’ War of 1524–25, the largest mass rebellion in European history before the French Revolution of 1789. The peasants had long-standing grievances about rents, rights and property, but reforming preachers were a vital catalyst. Suddenly peasants were denouncing serfdom as incompatible with Christian liberty, demanding that the people be able to elect their priests, and claiming that the Church’s riches ought to belong to everyone. None of this was what Luther had meant, but you did not have to stretch his ideas very far to get there. The most widespread set of demands, first adopted by the peasants of Swabia, ended with a deliberate echo of Luther at Worms: they offered to desist if they could be proved wrong from the Bible.

      Some of the rebels, influenced by preachers like Müntzer, wanted much more. Abolishing private property – didn’t the Bible record that the early Church had held all goods in common? Killing monks and priests – didn’t the Bible teach that idolaters should die? Overthrowing princes – didn’t the Bible promise a future kingdom of the saints? Even if these radicals were only clinging to the rebellion’s tail, they gave the whole enterprise an apocalyptic feel. Something more than rents and landholding was at stake. It was a moment to establish a just social order in anticipation of Christ’s imminent return.

      To his credit, Luther was torn. In early 1525, he wrote An Admonition to Peace, accepting that many of the peasants’ demands were fair but warning that rebellion was no way to secure them. To follow Christ meant meek submission, not pillage and insurrection. He advised the peasants, sombrely and with a magnificent lack of realism, to return home and humbly petition their betters for redress. Once it became clear that matters had passed that point, Luther’s deep social conservatism took over. His next pamphlet, Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, blustered,

      Nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog. . . . There is no time for sleeping; no place for patience or mercy. It is the time of the sword, not the day of grace. . . . I think there is not a devil left in hell; they have all gone into the peasants. . . . Stab, smite, slay, whoever can. If you die in doing it, well for you! A more blessed death can never be yours, for you die in obeying the divine Word.

      Ironically, Luther СКАЧАТЬ