REVIVAL OF MEDIÆVAL ANTI-ECCLESIASTICAL MOVEMENTS.
The revolt of Luther was the occasion for the appearance—the outbreak, it might be called—of a large amount of irregular independent thinking upon religion and theology which had expressed itself sporadically during the whole course of the Middle Ages. The great difference between the thinkers and their intellectual ancestors who were at war with the mediæval Church life and doctrine, did not consist in the expression of anything essentially new, but in the fact that the Renaissance had introduced a profound contempt for the intellectual structure of ecclesiastical dogma, and that the whole of the sixteenth century was instinct with the feeling of individuality and the pride of personal existence. The old thoughts were less careful to accommodate themselves to the recognised modes of theological statement, they took bolder forms of expression, presented sharper outlines, and appeared in more definite statements.
Part of this thinking scarcely belongs to ecclesiastical history at all. It never became the intellectual basis of an institution; it neither stirred nor moulded the lives of masses of men. The leaders of thought remained solitary thinkers, surrounded by a loose fringe of followers. But as there is always something immortal in the forcible expression of human thought, their opinions have not died altogether, but have affected powerfully all the various branches of the Christian Church at different periods and in divers ways. The old conceptions, somewhat disguised, perhaps, but still the same, reappear in most systems of speculative theology. It therefore demands a brief notice.
The greater portion of this intellectual effervescence, however, did not share the same fate. Menno Simons, aided, no doubt, by the winnowing fan of persecution, was able to introduce order into the wild fermenting elements of Anabaptism, and to form the Baptist Church which has had such an honourable history in Europe and America. Fausto Sozzini did the same for the heterogeneous mass of anti-Trinitarian thinking, and out of the confusion brought the orderly unity of an institutional life.
This great mass of crude independent thought may be roughly classified as Mystic, or perhaps Pantheist Mystic, Anabaptist, and anti-Trinitarian; but the division, so far as the earlier thinkers go, is very artificial. The groups continually overlap; many of the leaders of thought might be placed in two or in all three of these divisions. What characterised them all was that they had little sense of historical continuity, cared nothing for it, and so broke with the past completely; that they despaired of seeing any good in the historical Church, and believed that it must be ended, as it was impossible to mend it; and that they all possessed a strong sense of individuality, believing the human soul to be imprisoned when it accepted the confinement of a common creed, institution, or form of service unless of the very simplest kind.
Pantheistic Mysticism was no new thing in Christianity. As early as the sixth century at least, schools of thought may be found which interpreted such doctrines as the Trinity and the Person of Christ in ways which led to what must be called Pantheism; and if such modes of dissolving Christian doctrines had not a continuous succession within the Christian Church, they were always appearing. They were generally accompanied with a theory of an “inner light” which claimed either to supersede the Scriptures as the Rule of Faith, or at least to interpret them. The Scriptures were the husk which might be thrown away when its kernel, discovered by the “inner light,” was once revealed. The Schwenkfelds, Weigels, Giordano Brunos of the sixteenth century, who used what they called the “inner light” in somewhat the same way as the Council of Trent employed dogmatic tradition, had a long line of ancestry in the mediæval Church, and their appearance at the time of the Reformation was only the recrudescence of certain phases of mediæval thought. But, as has been said, such thinkers were never able, nor perhaps did they wish, to form their followers into a Church; and they belong much more to the history of philosophy than to an ecclesiastical narrative. They had no conception whatever of religion in the Reformation sense of the word. Their idea of faith was purely intellectual—something to be fed on metaphysics more or less refined.
By far the most numerous of those sixteenth century representatives of mediæval nonconformists were classed by contemporaries under the common name of Anabaptists or Katabaptists, because, from 1526 onwards, they all, or most of them, insisted on re-baptism as the sign of belonging to the brotherhood of believers. They were scattered over the greater part of Europe, from Sweden in the north to Venice in the south, from England in the west to Poland in the east. The Netherlands, Germany,—southern, north-western, and the Rhineland,—Switzerland, the Tyrol, Moravia, and Livonia were scenes of bloody persecution endured with heroic constancy. Their leaders flit across the pages of history, courageous, much-enduring men, to whom the world was nothing, whose eyes were fixed on the eternal throne of God, and who lived in the calm consciousness that in a few hours they might be fastened to the stake or called upon to endure more dreadful and more prolonged tortures,—men of every varying type of character, from the gentle and pious young Humanist Hans Denck to Jan Matthys the forerunner of the stern Camisard and Covenanter. No statement of doctrine can include the beliefs held in all their innumerable groups. Some maintained the distinctive doctrines of the mediæval Church (the special conceptions of a priestly hierarchy, and of the Sacraments being always excluded); others were Lutherans, Calvinists, or Zwinglians; some were Unitarians, and denied the usual doctrine of the Person of Christ;[598] a few must be classed among the Pantheists. All held some doctrine of an “inner light”; but while some sat very loose to the letter of Scripture, others insisted on the most literal reading and application of Biblical phraseology. They all united in maintaining that true Christians ought to live separate from the world (i.e. from those who were not rebaptized), in communities whose lives were to be modelled on the accounts given in the New Testament of the primitive Christians, and that the true Church had nothing whatever to do with the State.
Curiously enough, the leaders in the third group, the anti-Trinitarians, were almost all Italians.
The most outstanding man among them, distinguished alike by his learning, his pure moral life, a distinct vein of piety, and the calm courage with which he faced every danger to secure the propagation of his opinions, was the Spaniard Miguel Servede (Servetus),[599] who was burnt at Geneva in 1553. He was very much a man by himself. His whole line of thought separated him from the rest of the anti-Trinitarian group associated with the names of the Sozzini. He reached his position through a mystical Pantheism—a course of thought which one might have expected from a Spaniard. He made few or no disciples, and did not exert any permanent influence.
The other anti-Trinitarians of the first rank were all cultured Italians, whom the spirit of the Renaissance prompted to criticise and reconstruct theology as they found it. They were all men who had been driven to reject the Roman Church because of its corruptions and immoralities, and who had no conception of any other universal Christian society. Men of pure lives, pious after their own fashion, they never had any idea of what lay at the root of the Reformation thought of what real religion was. It never dawned upon them that the sum of Christianity is the God of Grace, manifest in Christ, accessible to every believing soul, and unwavering trust on man’s part. Their interest in religion was almost exclusively intellectual. The Reformers had defined the Church as the fellowship of believers, and they had said that the marks of that fellowship were the preaching of the Word and the right use of the sacraments—the means through which God manifests Himself to men, and men manifest their faith in God. These men never apprehended this; the only idea which they seemed able to have of the Church was a school of definite and correct opinions. Compelled to flee from their native land, they naturally took refuge in Switzerland or in the Grisons. It is almost pathetic to see how they utterly failed to understand the men among whom they found themselves. Reformation to them was a criticism and reconstruction of theology; they were simply carrying the criticism a little further than their new neighbours. They never perceived the real gulf fixed between them and the adherents of the Reformation.
They were all highly educated and cultivated men—individual units from all parts of Italy. Camillo Renato, who proclaimed himself an Anabaptist, was a Sicilian. Gentili came from Calabria; Gribaldo from Padua; Bernardino Occhino, who in his later days joined the band, and the two Sozzini from Siena. Alciat was a Piedmontese. Blandrata (Biandrata), the most energetic member of the group save Fausto Sozzini, belonged to a noble family in Saluzzo which had long been noted for the protection it had afforded to poor people persecuted by the Church. They were physicians or lawyers; one, Gentili, was a schoolmaster.
The strong sense of individuality, which seems the birthright of every Italian, fostered by their life within their small city republics, had been accentuated by the Renaissance. The historical past of Italy, and its political and social condition in the sixteenth century, made it impossible for the impulse towards reform to take any other shape than that of individual action. The strength and the impetus which comes from the thought of fellow-man, fellow-believer, and which was so apparent in the Reformation movements beyond the Alps and in the Jesuit reaction, was entirely lacking among these Reformers in Italy. In that land the Empire had never regained its power lost under the great Popes, Gregory VII. and Innocent III. The Romish Church presented itself to all Italians as the only possible form under which a wide-spreading Christian Society could be organised. If men rejected it, personal Christian life alone remained. The Church dominated the masses unprepared by any such conception of ecclesiastical reform as influenced the people in Germany and Switzerland. Only men who had received some literary education were susceptible to the influences making for Reformation. They were always prevented by the unbroken power of the agencies of the Church from organising themselves publicly into congregations, and could only meet to exchange confidences privately and on rare occasions.[600] We hear of several such assemblies, which invariably took the form of conferences, in which the members discussed and communicated to each other the criticisms of the mediæval theology which solitary meditation had suggested to them. They were much more like debating societies than the beginnings of a Church. Thus we hear of one at Vincenza,[601] in 1546, where about forty friends met, among whom was Lelio Sozzini, where they debated such doctrines as the Satisfaction of Christ, the Trinity, etc., and expressed doubts about their truth. It was inevitable that such men could not hope to create a popular movement towards Reformation in their native land, and also that they should be compelled to seek safety beyond the bounds of Italy. They fled, one by one, across the Alps. In the Grisons and in Reformed Switzerland they found little communities of their countrymen who had sought shelter there, and their presence was always followed by dissensions and by difficulties with the native Protestants.
Their whole habits of life and thought were not of the kind calculated to produce a lasting Christian fellowship. Their theological opinions, which were not the outcome of a new and living Christian experience, but had been the result of an intellectual criticism of the mediæval theology, had little stability, and did not tend to produce unity. The execution of Servede and the jealousy which all the Reformed cantons of Switzerland manifested towards opinions in any way similar to those of the learned Spaniard, made life in Switzerland as unsafe as it had been in Italy. They migrated to Poland and Transylvania, attracted by the freedom of thought existing in both lands.
Poland, besides, had special attractions for refugees from Italy. The two countries had long been in intimate relationship. Italian architects had designed the stately buildings in Crakau and other Polish cities, and the commercial intercourse between the two countries was great. The independence and the privileges of the Polish nobles secured them from ecclesiastical interference, and both Calvinism and Lutheranism had found many adherents among the aristocracy. They, like the Roman patricians of the early centuries, gave the security of their halls to their co-religionists, and the heads of the Romanist Church chafed at their impotence to prevent the spread of opinions and usages which they deemed heretical. In Transylvania the absence of a strong central government permitted the same freedom to the expression of every variety of religious opinion.
The views held by the group of anti-Trinitarians were by no means the same. They reproduced in Poland the same medley of views we find existing in the end of the third century. Some were Sabellians, others Adoptianists, a few were Arians. Perhaps most of them believed in the miraculous birth of our Lord, and held as a consequence that He ought to be adored; but a strong minority, under the leadership of Francis Davidis, repudiated the miraculous birth, and refused to worship Christ (non-adorantes). For a time they seem to have lived in a certain amount of accord with the members of the Reformed communities. A crisis came at the Polish Diet of 1564, and the anti-Trinitarians were recognised then to be a separate religious community, or ecclesia minor. This was the field in which Fausto Sozzini exercised his commanding intellect, his genius for organisation, and his eminently strong will. He created out of these jarring elements the Socinian Church.
The Anabaptist and the Socinian movements require, however, a more detailed description.