Название: History of the Reformation
Автор: Thomas M. Lindsay
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Документальная литература
isbn: 4064066379995
isbn:
It is scarcely possible for us in the twentieth century to imagine the thrill that went through Germany, and indeed through all Europe, when the news sped that a poor monk had burnt the Pope's Bull. Papal Bulls had been burnt before Luther's days, but the burners had been for the most part powerful monarchs. This tune it was done by a monk, with nothing but his courageous faith to back him. It meant that the individual soul had discovered its true value. If eras can be dated, modern history began on December 10th, 1520.
§ 6. Luther the Representative of Germany.
Hitherto we have followed Luther's personal career exclusively. It may be well to turn aside for a little to see how the sympathy of many classes of the people was gathering round him.
The representatives of foreign States who were present at the Diet of Worms, of England, Spain, and Venice, all wrote home to their respective governments about the extraordinary popularity which Luther enjoyed among almost every class of his fellow-countrymen; and, as we shall see, the despatches of Aleander, the papal nuncio at the Diet, are full of statements and complaints which confirm these reports. This popularity had been growing since 1517, and there are traces that many thoughtful men had been attracted to Luther some years earlier. The accounts of Luther's interview with Cardinal Cajetan at Augsburg, and his attitude at the Leipzig Disputation, had given a great impulse to the veneration with which people regarded him; but the veneration itself had been quietly growing, apart from any striking incidents in his career. The evidence for what follows has been collected chiefly from such private correspondence as has descended to us; and most stress has been laid on letters which were not addressed to Luther, and which were never meant to be seen by him. Men wrote to each other about him, and described the impression he was making on themselves and on the immediate circle of their acquaintances. We learn from such letters not merely the fact of the esteem, but what were the characteristics in the man which called it forth.175
A large part of the evidence comes from the correspondence of educated men, who, if they were not all Humanists strictly so called, belonged to that increasing class on whom the New Learning had made a great impression, and had produced the characteristic habit of mind which belonged to its possessors. The attitude and work of Erasmus had prepared them to appreciate Luther. The monkish opponents of the great Humanist had been thoroughly in the right when they feared the effects of his revolutionary ways of thinking, however they might be accompanied with appeals against all revolutionary action. He had exhibited his idea of what a life of personal religion ought to be in his Enchiridion; he had exposed the mingled Judaism and paganism of a great part of the popular religion; he had poured scorn on the trifling subtleties of scholastic theology, and had asked men to return to a simple “Christian Philosophy”; above all, he had insisted that Christianity could only renew its youth by going back to the study of the Holy Scriptures, and especially of the New Testament; and he had aided his contemporaries to make this return by his edition of the New Testament, and by his efforts to bring within their reach the writings of the earlier Church Fathers. His Humanist followers in Germany believed that they saw in Luther a man who was doing what their leader urged all men to do. They saw in Luther an Erasmus, who was going to the root of things. He was rejecting with increasing determination the bewildering sophistries of Scholasticism, and, what was more, he was showing how many of these had arisen by exalting the authority of the pagan Aristotle over that of St. Paul and St. Augustine. He had painfully studied these Schoolmen, and could speak with an authority on this matter; for he was a learned theologian. The reports of his lectures, which were spreading throughout Germany, informed them that he based his teaching on a simple exposition of the Holy Scriptures in the Vulgate version, which was sanctioned by the mediæval Church. He had revolted, and was increasingly in revolt, against those abuses in the ordinary religious life which were encouraged from sordid motives by the Roman Curia—abuses which Erasmus had pierced through and through with the light darts of his sarcasm; and Luther knew, as Erasmus did not, what he was speaking about, for he had surrendered himself to that popular religion, and had sought in it desperately for a means of reconciliation with God without succeeding in his quest. They saw him insisting, with a strenuousness no Humanist had exhibited, on the Humanist demand that every man had a right to stand true to his own personal conscientious convictions. If some of them, like Erasmus, in spite of their scorn of monkery, still believed that the highest type of the religious life was a sincere self-sacrificing Franciscan monk, they saw their ideal in the Augustinian Eremite, whose life had never been stained by any monkish scandal, and who had been proclaimed by his brother monks to be a model of personal holiness. They were sure that when he pled heroically for the freedom of the religious life, his courage, which they could not emulate, rested on a depth and strength of personal piety which they sadly confessed they themselves did not possess. If they complained at times that Luther spoke too strongly against the Pope, they admitted that he was going to the root of things in his attack. All clear-sighted men perceived that the one obstacle to reform was the theory of the papal monarchy, which had been laboriously constructed by Italian canonists after the failure of Conciliar reform—a theory which defied the old mediæval ecclesiastical tradition, and contradicted the solemn decisions of the great German Councils of Constance and Basel. Luther's attacks on the Papacy were not stronger than those of Gerson and d'Ailly, and his language was not more unmeasured than that of their common master, William of Occam. There was nothing in these early days to prevent men who were genuinely attached to the mediæval Church, its older theology and its ancient rites, from rallying round Luther. When the marches began to be redd, and the beginnings of a Protestant Church confronted the mediæval, the situation was changed. Many who had enthusiastically supported Luther left him.
Conrad Mutianus, canon of Gotha, and the veteran leader of the Erfurt circle of Humanists, wrote admiringly of the originality of Luther's sermons as early as 1515. He applauded the stand he took СКАЧАТЬ