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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ No doubt it felt good, but these overblown caricatures only dented the Philippists’ own credibility. German princes who had until now tried to broker compromise began to shift their ground. The turning point came in 1574, when the elector of Saxony, Augustus, purged the Philippists from the theology faculty at Wittenberg, on the grounds of crypto-Calvinism. In 1576, the Saxons set about trying to resolve the issue once and for all. The Formula of Concord, which six theologians under Saxony’s sponsorship produced in May 1577, looked moderate only by comparison with Philippist hyperbole. Pressured by Augustus, one by one Germany’s Lutheran territories adopted it as the only legitimate interpretation of the Augsburg Confession. In 1580, it was incorporated into a Book of Concord, a collection of Lutheran texts that became the canonical definition of Lutheran orthodoxy. Philippism’s back was broken, and with it any wish to build bridges with Calvinism.

      That, at least, was the story within Germany, the Lutheran world’s centre of gravity. On the periphery, there were different stories. Poland’s history as a crucible of early Protestantism is now largely forgotten. Poland had a Catholic majority, but substantial numbers of Lutheran and Reformed Protestants mixed with radicals who denied the doctrine of the Trinity. There were also the Bohemian Brethren, representatives of a tradition going back a century before Luther to the Czech preacher Jan Hus but who were broadly sympathetic to Protestantism. Out of this fragile and splintered situation emerged Jan Łaski, the Polish Calvin. A former student of Erasmus’s, he returned home from a decade’s exile in 1556 to try to unite Polish Protestantism. He aimed to shore up relations between the Reformed church and the Bohemian Brethren and to cast this alliance in sufficiently open terms to make it seem safe for the Lutherans to join too.

      Łaski died in 1560, but his dream did not die with him. As the political tides turned against Polish Protestantism over the following decade, the pressure to unite increased. The Polish Lutherans were reluctant, but their relations with the Bohemian Brethren were relatively warm, and they eventually agreed to submit the Brethren’s Confession of Faith to the theologians at Wittenberg for their judgment. The Philippists at Wittenberg were happy to approve it. Suddenly Lutherans and Calvinists found themselves with a shared ally. A moment of goodwill opened up and was seized. A three-way conference lasting a mere six days in April 1570 produced the Consensus of Sendomir.

      The Consensus of Sendomir is a fair picture of what the much-imagined Protestant unity might have looked like. It committed all parties to mutual goodwill and peace. Its statement on the Eucharist is masterfully ambiguous, along lines that Calvin and Bucer would have recognized: Christ’s body and blood are “truly” received, and what that means is left to the individual believer. The consensus was accepted by Polish Protestants of all stripes, who urged their brethren elsewhere to follow the Polish example. Instead, most ignored it and have done so ever since.¹⁶

      Denmark was no keener on Gnesio-Lutheran rigidity. Frederik II, king of Denmark from 1559 to 1588, was the Lutheran world’s most powerful prince and was trying to forge an alliance with the more or less Calvinist kingdom of England. On a Europe-wide scale, the Formula of Concord was far more divisive than unifying. Frederik accused the Germans of behaving like miniature popes, and they accused him of crypto-Calvinism. When his sister, Elector Augustus’s wife, sent him two beautifully bound presentation copies of the Book of Concord as a gift in 1581, he publicly threw them on the fire. The Formula had pacified Germany, but concord had its limits, and its price.¹⁷

Dreams of Union

      By the 1580s, Protestant theological consensus seemed out of reach. But there were other routes to unity. One looked back to Erasmus: instead of all this ridiculous doctrinal hairsplitting, why not simply live a good Christian life? In Strassburg in the early 1540s, Katharina Schütz Zell, the sixteenth century’s most distinguished female Protestant theologian, made a valiant attempt to bring three of her colleagues – a Lutheran, a Zwinglian and a radical – into dialogue on the basis of love of neighbours and a common acceptance of Scripture.¹⁸ Significantly, like Erasmus himself, she lacked a formal, academic training in theology, and like Erasmus she suspected that the whole business of theology served only to breed dissent.

      Such approaches were, therefore, less impartial than they looked, because they depended on belittling other people’s deeply held convictions. It was, again, a Calvinist, or Philippist, approach rather than a Gnesio-Lutheran one. Calvinists were the more direct heirs of Erasmus and saw ethics as vital for defining a Christian community. That was one of the things Gnesio-Lutherans most disliked. For them, all this talk of ethics seemed to miss the point that sinful human beings simply cannot live ethically without the transforming power of true faith. Doctrine had to come first.

      Where an appeal to shared ethics failed, however, more pragmatic considerations might succeed. Nothing unites like a common enemy, and early Protestants were under mortal threat from the Catholic powers. This was unity not for the sake of peace but so as to fight all the better. It was temporary: an agreement to shelve disputes only until the emergency was over. It therefore did not require absolute agreement, merely a broad recognition of spiritual kinship.

      However, not all Protestants faced the same threats. As we shall see in the next chapter, in the religious wars of the later sixteenth century, Calvinists in France, the Netherlands, and the British Isles were in the front line. Some Lutheran princes and territories did provide logistical and diplomatic support, but it was the Calvinists who needed unity urgently. During the terrible existential crisis of the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648, the entire survival of northern European Protestantism seemed at stake. Some Lutherans, especially the Scandinavians, discovered a renewed zeal for cooperation. Now, however, the premier Calvinist power, Great Britain, remained aloof. Unity at gunpoint was fleeting at best.

      The battle with Catholicism did decisively shape Protestant attempts at unity, however. Catholics mocked Protestants for their divisions and tried to damn them all with the worst excesses of a few extremists. Protestants therefore had a strong incentive to present a moderate, united front, rather than appear like a sackful of squabbling fanatics. The chief victims of this need were the radicals. It became imperative for “mainstream” Protestants of all kinds to draw a line between themselves and the radicals, by any means necessary. Hence the most notorious incident of Calvin’s career. In 1553, a Spaniard named Miguel Servetus came to Geneva. “Radical” hardly does justice to Servetus, a brilliant physician and freethinker who denied the doctrine of the Trinity, the authority of the Bible, and virtually everything else that respectable Christians held dear. He was already on the run from the Inquisition. Virtually any territory in Europe would have executed him, and Calvin, who had read his books with horror, had warned him never to come to Geneva. When Servetus came nevertheless, he was arrested, tried for heresy, and, eventually, burned alive.

      Calvin’s defenders have advanced various excuses for his part in Servetus’s death. It was the only such trial in which Calvin was involved, and most other leading Protestants were implicated in more bloodshed. Servetus was executed by the Genevan city government, not by Calvin, who petitioned for the more merciful punishment of beheading. All this is true. Yet Calvin testified against Servetus at his trial and solicited condemnations of him from a range of other Protestant leaders. When the city authorities considered banishing Servetus, on the grounds that they had no jurisdiction over him, Calvin insisted that Geneva be seen to take responsibility for stopping this menace to orthodoxy.¹⁹

      Calvin’s concern was not simply to stop Servetus’s blasphemous mouth but also to vindicate his own model godly republic. In retrospect, Servetus appears like a harmless crank, but in the early 1550s, with radical ideas of various kinds bubbling up across the continent, it was not foolish to fear that the Reformation might dissolve into self-defeating revolutionary chaos. A line had to be drawn. Calvin positively wanted radical blood on his hands; it was a marker of respectability for the Lutherans and for potential converts, and a challenge to Catholics who could not, now, easily dismiss him as an extremist. But unsurprisingly, СКАЧАТЬ