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

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СКАЧАТЬ a whole continent united in the faith. Not many contemporaries were troubled by the fact that their religion celebrated martyrs who chose to die rather than renounce their beliefs and also compelled dissidents to choose between death and renouncing their beliefs.

      The problem, as St Augustine had recognized in the fifth century, was that martyrs cannot in fact prove that their religion is correct by dying for it. People die for all kinds of beliefs, and they cannot all be right. Augustine concluded that the cause, not the death, makes a true martyr. If you die for the truth, you are a martyr, but if you die for an error, you are deluded or a servant of the devil. That may sound like self-serving relativism, but again, the role of the Church is decisive. The truth is determined not by anyone’s private judgement but by the Church’s collective voice, guided by the Holy Spirit. You might have honest scruples about doctrine, but how could your private doubts weigh against the certain authority of the Church?

      This was precisely the argument Martin Luther’s opponents threw at him. And Luther, utterly convinced of the truth he had perceived in Scripture, concluded, logically enough, that any authority that denounced that truth must be false. He was driven to deny that the Church could authoritatively denounce heresy. That was itself almost the greatest heresy of all. Across Europe, the Church’s traditional machinery ground slowly into action against the new Protestant enemy.

      England’s example is typical. In 1521, Henry VIII was still ostentatiously Catholic. With an eye on the burgeoning scandal in Germany, he sponsored a public burning of heretical books in London, accompanied by forceful preaching against heresy. This was a theatrical pre-emptive strike; there were as yet no English Lutherans, and the books had had to be imported specially for the show. When the performance was repeated five years later, there were a few real English converts, some of whom made humiliating public recantations during the performance.² This was how the English had long dealt with their own indigenous heretics, the unsophisticated but stubbornly ineradicable movement known as the Lollards. Lollards were serial recanters, who mocked the Church’s rites scabrously in their private gatherings but were rarely willing to stand firm when their lives were at stake.

      Yet it soon became clear that these new heretics were different: not peasants deploying crude commonsense rationalism, but clerics and scholars, hard to overawe and unseemly to burn. The bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall, spent long hours trying to woo individual suspects back to orthodoxy, smoothing over troubles and compromising where he could. He persuaded England’s most outspoken early evangelical, Thomas Bilney, to make an ambiguous, carefully negotiated recantation in 1527.³

      Not everyone shared Tunstall’s instinct that the Reformation was a misunderstanding to be resolved between gentlemen. Thomas More, lawyer, friend of Erasmus’s, and England’s most famous scholar, was appalled by Tunstall’s compromises; the law was “so far stretched forth that the leather could scant hold”.⁴ More, softhearted neither toward others nor toward himself, favoured rigour, and as the heresy problem burgeoned, he took charge. Over the next five years, a swathe of suspects were imprisoned, interrogated, and sometimes tortured, and a dozen were burned. Bilney, stricken by his conscience after his recantation and newly defiant, was one of the first to die.

      Tunstall and More’s dilemma – soft words versus exemplary rigour – was repeated across Western Christendom. Few countries had legal bureaucracies capable of full-scale campaigns of repression. Spain and Portugal had a battle-hardened Inquisition which ensured that no popular Protestantism of any kind ever took root there; a fledgling evangelical movement briefly appeared in Spain in 1558 and was swiftly exterminated. Italy is a more tantalizing case, because it did have a nascent evangelical movement in the 1530s. But when the Inquisition was re-established across Italy in 1542, these reformers either fled to exile or returned to conformity. This was how it should have worked everywhere. If the response is tough and consistent enough, hardly any burnings should be necessary.

      France shows how easily this could go wrong. Francis I, king from 1515 to 1547, was amused by fashionably daring scholarship and also locked in a generational struggle with the Emperor Charles V, Luther’s nemesis. He was therefore tempted to give houseroom to moderate reformers. Paris around 1530 was a tantalizing place for evangelicals; this was where John Calvin was converted. But as Tunstall had discovered, appeasement served only to embolden Protestants. One night in 1534, a series of outrageously provocative placards denouncing the Mass were posted anonymously across Paris. One found its way to the door of the king’s bedchamber. A sudden wave of repression followed, and many reformers, including Calvin, fled abroad. But repression was not consistently maintained. France still hoped to recruit Germany’s Lutheran princes as allies against the emperor. Calvin dedicated his Institutio to King Francis because he believed that he could still win him over.

      In any case, the French state did not have the means to enforce a blanket policy of persecution. Nor did most of its neighbours. Even in centralized England, where Thomas More’s repression would probably have succeeded if Henry VIII’s marital drama had not intervened, English heresy hunters found themselves hamstrung by legal technicalities. It was harder still in the decentralized or fragmented polities that made up most of Europe, where the whim of individual bishops or judges could set local religious policy. Local persecution often merely pushed dissidents across porous borders. The problem was at its worst in the Netherlands, where a determined assault on heresy ran up against flimsy borders, entrenched local legal cultures, a cat’s cradle of jurisdictions, and some very cosmopolitan cities. Well over a thousand deaths did no more than keep the lid on the problem.

      As the Church cried heresy, the fledgling Protestant movement countered it with martyrdom, an ideal that had been at the heart of Luther’s thought from the beginning. He distinguished between what he called theologies of glory and theologies of the cross. A theologian of glory was self-serving and self-aggrandizing, whereas a theologian of the cross followed Christ’s path of self-denial. Christ’s true Church must be a suffering, persecuted Church, constantly assaulted by the devil. If a church was at peace, rich, and powerful, that alone proved it was already securely in Satan’s bondage, even before it proceeded to attack the true, persecuted believers.

      So Protestants embraced martyrdom, seeking out persecution as a sign that God loved them. One of Martin Luther’s great spiritual crises came in the late 1520s when he realized that the sentence of condemnation that had hung over him since the Diet of Worms was unlikely ever to be carried out. Surely this meant God had rejected him?⁵ In reality, of course, most Protestants never faced arrest or trial. Persecution was a fact, but it was also a myth, and that was what made it powerful. The tales of Luther’s courage at Worms, and then of the first actual martyrs, were treasured, retold, and replayed in believers’ imaginations as they put themselves in their heroes’ shoes and asked themselves what they would do if they came to the time of trial.

      In the 1550s, this storytelling culminated in collected volumes of martyr stories published in Dutch, German, and French, their authors joining individual atrocities into great national struggles between the suffering Church of Christ and the cruel church of Antichrist. A still grander narrative was planned by an Englishman, John Foxe. Having originally conceived a vast Latin encyclopedia of cruelty, uniting English and Continental stories, he was eventually persuaded instead to produce an English-language martyrology, the Acts and Monuments, first published in 1563, in the wake of Queen Mary’s sharp persecution of Protestants. Under the new Protestant queen, Elizabeth, Foxe set England’s sufferings in the context of the whole of Christian history. Ancient Christian martyrs and modern Protestant martyrs were brethren. Persecuting Roman emperors had now been replaced by persecuting Roman Catholics.⁶

      Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, as it swiftly became known, would become fundamental to English-speaking Protestants’ imagination and has been repeatedly reprinted, abridged, and updated. It is a thing of paradoxes. Foxe was a consummate internationalist, an idealistic radical who conscientiously opposed all religious violence and saw England’s state Protestantism as badly compromised. But his book became an icon of national identity, a charter СКАЧАТЬ