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

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       CHAPTER 4

       Heretics, Martyrs and Witches

      Be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods.

      – DANIEL 3:18

      Protestantism was born in the fear and hope of bloodshed. From Luther’s first appearance on the public stage, it was clear he risked execution as a heretic. The killing actually took a little while to begin; the first of Luther’s disciples to be burned alive as unrepentant heretics were two Dutch friars who died in 1523. More soon followed. Over the next half a century, more than three thousand men and women were put to death in Europe for crimes of belief. The killings were neither steady nor evenly spread, but were concentrated in short outbursts in a few countries: France, England, above all the Netherlands.¹ By the 1560s, judicial executions were giving way to full-scale religious warfare. Those casualties are much harder to count but certainly ran into the hundreds of thousands. When the killing finally abated, from the middle of the seventeenth century, it left behind entrenched bitterness, punctuated by ongoing spasms of brutality.

      This violence marked Protestantism permanently. Because Protestants were often its victims, it kept many Protestants in a kind of defensive crouch for two centuries, a posture that had lasting effects. But they traded in the same currency. When they had the chance, they persecuted not only Catholics but also each other. And for all their differences with Catholicism, they readily closed ranks with the papists against real or imagined threats from beyond Christianity’s bounds.

      The alternative – whispered by a few in the sixteenth century, spoken by a growing chorus through the seventeenth – was religious coexistence. Modern Protestants have often enjoyed telling themselves a self-congratulatory story in which their tradition gave rise to tolerance and freedom, and that is rather less than a half-truth. But it is not completely false. This was indeed the age when a measure of religious tolerance began to be possible, both in theory and in practice. Our subject in this chapter is how Protestants learned to die, to kill, and under some circumstances, not to kill.

Martyrdom and Heresy

      Protestants thought about these questions using two ancient Christian categories: martyrdom and heresy. Martyrs are literally witnesses – believers who bear witness to their faith in the most vivid and unanswerable way, by choosing to die rather than to renounce it. Martyrs were supposed to go to their deaths with lamblike submission and defiant resolve – like St Stephen, the first Christian martyr in the Acts of the Apostles, or indeed like Jesus Christ himself.

      Because martyrdom was the highest honour for which any Christian might hope, to be persecuted was, paradoxically, proof of God’s love. That paradox has helped give Christianity its tremendous resilience. The harder your enemies hit you, the firmer your convictions become. State violence normally works by intimidating its victims into compliance. Ancient Christians found instead that martyrdom served as a kind of spiritual judo, in which they derived strength from the very fact of their persecution. The blood of the martyrs, proverbially, was the seed of the Church. The end of the Roman persecution of Christians in the fourth century meant that the supply of martyrs dried up, and in medieval Europe it almost ceased, yet the rarity of true martyrdom only made the ideal more alluring.

      At the same time as it nursed this hunger for martyrdom, Western Christendom developed its concept of heresy, a word that literally means “choice”. A doctrinal error is not a heresy. Heresy is an act of the will: asserting your own judgement rather than submitting obediently to the mind of the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit. An error only becomes heretical when someone consciously and deliberately defies the Church’s ruling. Orthodoxy versus heresy is more about obedience versus wilfulness than truth versus error. Heresy is a moral offence, not an intellectual one.

      In medieval Europe, heretics were seen both as threats to public safety, peddling seductive lies that might drag innocents down to hell with them, and as traitors against God, wilfully spreading disgusting slanders against him. Good Christians could hardly stand idly by. So from the tenth century onward, heresy was treated as a crime. Because medieval justice was public, symbolic, and exemplary, this might ultimately mean death by burning: a symbol of the fires of hell to which heretics had condemned themselves, a vividly gruesome deterrent, and a practical way of disposing of a body unworthy of Christian burial. It also made a good show, and in northern Europe, where dry wood and good weather were rarities, often an extended one.

      It is worth the effort to see these atrocities through our forebears’ eyes. They lived in a much more publicly violent society than we do, but they did not impose such terrible punishments out of simple malice. The ideal outcome of a heresy trial was always repentance. Heretics who renounced their errors were usually spared, unless they were repeat offenders. This was why heresy inquiries were led by priests; they were pastoral processes, whose purpose was to reconcile sinners. Heresy both began and ended as a choice: to live in the true faith, or to die in error. The threat of fire was a merciful severity, helping waverers to choose wisely.

      For centuries, this worked. A series of medieval dissident movements such as the Cathars and the Waldensians were suppressed or eliminated. In the late fifteenth century, a new variant arose in Spain, where Jews who had been forcibly converted to Christianity were treated as heretics if they kept the rites of their old faith. The Spanish Inquisition pursued them with unprecedented ferocity, killing over ten thousand. But this is better understood as a state pogrom, a spasm of Jew-hating that happened to make use of the heresy laws. Elsewhere, heretics were hunted СКАЧАТЬ