The unrestrained language which Luther again employed towards the Swiss did much to demonstrate how little real foundation there was in the efforts at conciliation. The experiences he met with made him regret his passing opportunism, and in later life the tone in which he spoke of the Zwinglian errors and their supporters was violent in the extreme. When a letter reached him from the Evangelicals of Venice bewailing the dissensions aroused by the controversy on the Sacrament, he said in his reply, dated June, 1543: These Zwinglians and their neighbours “are intoxicated by an alien spirit, and their company must be avoided as infectious.”[1427]
To his friend Link he wrote about that time: “These Swiss and Zürichers pronounce their own condemnation by their pride and madness, as Paul says” (Titus iii. 11).[1428] To Zürich itself he soon made no secret of his changed temper, writing in August that: he could have no fellowship with the preachers there; they were determined to lead the unfortunate people to hell; the judgment of God which had overtaken Zwingli would also fall upon these preachers of blasphemy, since they had made up their minds to follow Zwingli.[1429]
In September of that same year appeared his energetic “Kurtz Bekentnis Doctor Martin Luthers vom heiligen Sacrament.”[1430]
Complying with a need he felt he sought in this writing to give public testimony to his faith in the Eucharist; in order at once to disperse the ghosts of the Concord, and to bar the progress of the denial of the Sacrament which had already infected Melanchthon and other friends around him, he here speaks frankly and openly. In his usual vein he says, that it was his wish “to be able to boast at the Judgment Seat of the Lord” that “I condemned with all my power the fanatics and enemies of the Sacrament, Carlstadt, ‘Zwingel,’ [Œcolampadius, ‘Stinkfield’ [Schwenckfeld], and their disciples at Zürich and wherever else they be.” The fanatics, he says, make a “great to-do” about a spiritual eating and drinking, but they are “murderers of souls.” They have a “devilish heart and lying lips.” Whoever believed not the Article concerning Christ’s Presence in the Sacrament, could not believe in the Incarnation. “Hence there is no alternative, you must either believe everything or nothing.” Thus Luther himself at last comes to urge against his opponents what Catholic apologists had long before urged against him. They had said: If you set aside this or that article of faith on the grounds of a higher illumination, the result will be the complete subversion of the faith, for the edifice of doctrine is one inseparable whole; the divine and the ecclesiastical authority is the same for all the articles, and, if everything be not accepted, in the end nothing will remain.
2. Efforts in view of a Council. Vergerio visits Luther
Pope Clement VII. († 1534), though at first apprehensive, owing to his knowledge of what had happened in the time of the Reforming Councils, had nevertheless, towards the end of his life, promised the Emperor Charles V. at Bologna, in 1533, that he would summon an [Œcumenical Council. He had also sought to persuade the King of France, François I., on the occasion of their meeting at Marseilles in the same year, to agree to the Council’s being held in one of the Italian towns which Pope and Emperor had agreed on at Bologna.[1431] But while Rome showed herself willing enough, the King of France put great obstacles in the way of a Council, in the hope, that, by preventing it, he would prevent Germany from securing peace within her borders.
Paul III., the successor of Clement VII., was more successful, though he too had to battle with his own scruples and to overcome obstacles greater even than those which faced his predecessor.
Soon after beginning his pontificate he dispatched three Nuncios to pave the way for the Council, Rodolfo Pio de Carpi to France, Giovanni Guidiccione to Spain, and Pierpaolo Vergerio to Germany. The last of these found the Catholic Courts perfectly willing to support the Council; the heads of the Evangelical party, however, chose to observe an attitude to be more fully described further on.
Charles V. having agreed to the choice of Mantua as the town where the Council was to be held, Paul III., in spite of the refusal of the Protestants, by his Bull of June 2, 1536, summoned the bishops to meet at Mantua on May 23 of the following year. Needless to say, the assembly and its procedure were to be governed by the same rules as in the case of earlier Councils of the Church.
The journey of Vergerio, the Nuncio, through Germany deserves closer attention on account of his meeting with Luther.