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

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       CHAPTER 1

       Luther and the Fanatics

      If God be for us, who can be against us?

      – ROMANS 8:31

      Everyone knew how it was supposed to end. The One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, headed on earth by the bishop of Rome, the successor of St Peter and vicar of Christ, had endured in Europe for over a thousand years. Nothing survives that long by accident. For Christians in the early sixteenth century who reflected on that astonishing fact, the explanation was obvious. This was no human institution. It was the visible Body of its founder, guided by the Holy Spirit. It would outlast this fading world and the carping of its critics, enduring for ever to God’s glory.

      Nowadays, we prefer more mundane explanations. Catholic Christendom was flexible and creative, a walled garden with plenty of scope for novelty and variety, and room to adapt to changing political, social, and economic climates. But it also had boundaries, marked and unmarked. Those who wandered too far would be urged, and if necessary forced, to come back.

      So if a professor at a small German university questioned an archbishop’s fund-raising practices, there was a limited range of possible outcomes. The archbishop might ignore it or quietly concede the point. Or the professor might be induced to back down, by one means or another. If none of this happened, the matter would be contested on a bigger stage. Perhaps one party or the other in the debate would persuade his opponent to agree with him. Or, more likely, the process would be mired in procedure until the protagonists gave up or died. But if it reached an impasse, the troublesome professor would eventually be ordered to give way. In the unlikely event that he refused, the only recourse was the law, leading to the one outcome that nobody wanted: he could be executed as an impenitent heretic, in a fire that would purge Christendom of his errors and symbolize the hell to which he had wilfully condemned himself.

      This system had worked for centuries. But in 1517, when that professor, Martin Luther, challenged Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, his challenge instead kindled a series of increasingly uncontrollable wildfires that swept away many of the Catholic Church’s ancient structures and its walls. We call this firestorm the Reformation and the new form, or forms, of Christianity that emerged from it, Protestantism.

      This was not what Luther had intended. When he voiced his local protest, he was not trying to start a fire. He was working out the implications of his own recent spiritual breakthrough and trying to start an argument about it. It turned out that those implications reached much further than either he or his opponents initially imagined. Once the smoke began to clear, they were forced to realize that they were in a new world.

The Call of Reform

      With hindsight, we can see that Luther’s fire caught because fuel had been quietly building up for some time. The principal fuel was desire for reform of the Church.

      Churches always need reform. They are staffed by human beings, some of whom will inevitably be fools, knaves, or merely incompetents. The Church of the later Middle Ages was no more “corrupt” than usual, and in many ways much less so. Yet three problems converged to make it appear worse than it was: money, power, and high principle.

      The Western Church was very rich. It had to be; it was responsible for a continental network of parish priests, church buildings, and monastic houses, supported by an international bureaucracy of unparalleled sophistication, and these things do not come cheap. It had to preserve its political independence in a dangerous world, which meant choosing leaders of royal and noble stock. These were men – and some women, the great abbesses – whose dignity and effectiveness in their offices depended on maintaining the high courtly style to which they had been born.

      Yet this was also an age that actively valued poverty, lauding it as a positive virtue like no Christian society before or since. The ideal late medieval cleric was a friar, who was forbidden even to touch money and who was supposed not even to own the rough clothes on his back. The contrast between that ideal and the Church’s corporate wealth was disturbing. Surely all that money must be corrupting? Once, as a rueful proverb had it, golden priests had served from wooden chalices; now wooden priests served from golden chalices. Every time the Church extracted rents, tithes, or other payments from its flock, it fed a resentment that went beyond ordinary taxpayers’ grumbles. And when there were real or perceived financial abuses, the gap between high ideals and sordid reality yawned dangerously wide. Martin Luther was a friar as well as a professor. When a man in his position accused the Church of moneygrubbing, people were ready to listen.

      Then there was power. Back in the eleventh century, the popes had wriggled free from political control and established a vigilantly guarded independence. By the fifteenth century, they had quietly dropped some of their more startling claims. In theory, they were lords of Christendom, able to depose kings and demand universal obedience, but they knew not to push their luck. They had never really recovered from the ghastly schism of 1378–1417, when Europe was split between first two and then three rival popes. The schism was ended by a great reforming Church council, which seemed to promise an era of renewal – a hope that slowly evaporated over the following decades, leaving a residue of bitterness. By 1500, virtually all Western Christians acknowledged the papacy, but they were not proud of it. Eye-popping tales were told about Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503), Rodrigo Borgia, who in 1501 supposedly held an orgy in the papal apartments for his son, to which he invited fifty chosen prostitutes and select senior clerics. True or not, it was widely believed.

      Inadequate leadership and financial corruption make a dangerous mix. All the more so in “Germany”, the vast, north-central European territories that fell loosely under the so-called Holy Roman Emperor. The rivalry between popes and emperors was ancient, and as the papal court became dominated almost exclusively by Italians after the schism, it seemed increasingly foreign north of the Alps. National stereotypes came into play. Germans were, in their own minds, bluff, honest, easily duped, but firm in the defence of the right. Italians, by contrast, were scheming, malevolent, effeminate, avaricious, and cowardly. So when a German friar accused Italians of extortion and tyranny, German ears were ready to hear him.

      There was also a matter of principle at stake. As well as some memorable popes, the Renaissance gave Western Christendom a slogan: ad fontes, “to the sources”, an urge to return to the ancient, and therefore pure, founts of truth. By 1500, this fashion for antiquity was sweeping into every field of knowledge. Renaissance linguists tried to recover the glories of Cicero. Renaissance generals tried, with dubious success, to remodel their armies as Roman legions. The problem with the ancient world was that it happened a long time ago, and reconstructing it involved guesswork. But late medieval Europeans never doubted that it had been a world of pristine perfection. They measured their own age against that imagined ideal. Inevitably, it fell short. And so the most devastating critiques of the late medieval Church came not from the discontented or marginalized but from within: from powerful establishment figures who believed in an ideal Church and who would not hide their disappointment with the reality. They wanted to renew the Church, not destroy it.

      Leading these critics was the age’s intellectual colossus, Erasmus of Rotterdam, a brilliant, sharp-tongued, penny-pinching, peripatetic monk who combined a deliberately simple piety, an acid wit and a finely judged sense of when СКАЧАТЬ