It is not my province to follow in detail the vicissitudes of the Reformation, but only to indicate briefly its relations with sacerdotal asceticism. Luther, at first, like Wickliffe and Huss, paid no attention to the subject. In fact, when, on the 31st of October, 1217, he nailed on the church door of Wittenberg his celebrated ninety-five propositions, nothing was further from his expectations than to create a heresy, a schism, or even a general reform in the church. He had simply in view to vindicate his ideas on the subject of justification, derived from St. Augustin, against the Thomist doctrines which had been exaggerated into the monstrous abuses of Tetzel and his fellows.[1046] In the general movement of the human mind at that period so much had been said that was inimical to the received practices of the church, without calling forth the thunders of Rome, that men seemed to think the day of toleration had at last come. The hierarchy sat serenely upon their thrones and in the confidence of unassailable power appeared willing to allow any freedom of speculation which did not assail their temporal privileges. Yet amid the general agitation and opposition to Rome which pervaded society, it was impossible for a bold and self-reliant spirit such as Luther’s not to advance step by step in a career of which the ultimate goal was as little foreseen by himself as by others. Still his progress was wonderfully slow. Even in 1519 he still considered himself within the pale of the church, and held that no wrong committed by her could justify a separation or excuse any resistance to the commands of a pope;[1047] and in the same year, in a sermon on matrimony, he alluded not unfavorably to the life of virginity.[1048] Events soon after forced him to further and more dangerous innovations, yet when Leo X., in June, 1520, issued his celebrated bull, “Exsurge Domine” to crush the rising heresy, in the forty-one errors enumerated as taught by Luther, there is no allusion to any doctrine specially inimical to ascetic celibacy.[1049]
This condemnation, followed as it was by the public burning of his writings, aroused Luther to a more active and aggressive hostility than he had previously manifested, In his book “De Captivitate Babylonica Ecclesiæ” he attacked the sacrament of ordination, denied that it separated the priest from his fellows, and ridiculed the rule concerning digami, which excluded from the priesthood a man who had been the husband of any but a virgin, while another who had polluted himself with six hundred concubines was eligible to the episcopate or papacy.[1050] Finally on Dec. 10th, 1520, he proclaimed war to the knife by burning at Wittenberg the books of the canon law and justifying this act by a manifesto recapitulating the damnable doctrines contained in them. Among these he enumerates the prohibition of sacerdotal marriage, as the origin and cause of excessive vice and scandal.[1051] As he said himself, hitherto he had only been playing at controversy with the Pope, but this was the beginning of the tragedy.[1052] Soon after this, in a controversy with Ambrogio Catarino, he stigmatized the rule of celibacy as angelical in appearance, but devilish in reality, and invented by Satan as a fertile source of sin and perdition.[1053]
In the mighty movement which was agitating men’s minds, Luther had been anticipated in this. As early as 1518, a monk of Dantzic named James Knade, abandoned his order, married, and publicly preached resistance to Rome. It is evident that in this he had the support of the people, for though he was imprisoned and tried by the ecclesiastical authorities, the only punishment inflicted on him was banishment.[1054] In the multitude of other questions more interesting to the immediate disputants this point of discipline seems to have attracted but little attention until 1521, when during Luther’s enforced seclusion in Wartburg, Bartholomew Bernhardi, pastor of Kammerich, near Wittenberg, put the heresiarch’s views into action in the most practical way by obtaining the consent of his parish and celebrating his nuptials with all due solemnity. Albert, Archbishop of Mainz and Magdeburg, addressed to Frederic, Elector of Saxony, a demand for the rendition of the culprit, which that prudent patron of the Reformation skilfully eluded, and Bernhardi published a short defence or apology in which he denounced the rule of celibacy as a “frivolam traditiunculam.” He argued the matter, quoting the texts which since his time have been generally employed in support of sacerdotal marriage; he referred to Peter and Philip, Spiridon of Cyprus, and Hilary of Poitiers, as examples of married bishops, quoted the story of Paphnutius, and relied on the authority of the Greek church. This apparently did not satisfy the archbishop, for Bernhardi felt obliged to address a second apology to Frederic of Saxony, to whom he appealed for protection against the displeasure of his ecclesiastical superiors.[1055] In spite of molestation, he continued in the exercise of his priestly functions until death. Less fortunate were his immediate imitators. A priest of Mansfeld who took to himself a wife was thrown into prison at Halle by the Archbishop of Mainz, and Jacob Siedeler, pastor of Glashütten, in Misnia, who was guilty of the same crime, perished miserably in the dungeon of Stolpen, to which he was committed by Duke George of Saxony.[1056]
The enthusiastic Carlostadt, relieved for the time from the restraint of Luther’s cooler wisdom, threw himself with zeal into this new movement of reform, and lost no time in justifying it by a treatise in which he argued strenuously in favor of priestly marriage, and energetically denounced the monastic vows as idle and vain. Luther, however, in his retreat, seems not yet prepared to take any very decided position. In a letter of Jan. 17th, 1522, to Wolfgang Fabricius Capito, one of the officials of the Archbishop of Mainz, he takes the latter severely to task with respect to his action in a case of the kind—probably that of the priest of Mansfeld alluded to above. The man had been set at liberty, but forced to separate himself from his wife, and Capito had defended himself on the ground that the woman was a harlot. Luther asks him why he had been so earnest with a single strumpet, when he had taken no action with so many under his jurisdiction in Halberstadt, Mainz, and Magdeburg, and adds that when the priest had acknowledged the woman as his wife there should have been nothing further done. He proceeds to say, however, that he does not ask for the freedom of sacerdotal marriage, and that he is not prepared to take any general position concerning it, except that it is lawful under God.[1057] Either with or without his approbation, however, his friends lost no time in enforcing the new dogma which they proclaimed to the world in the most authoritative manner. During the same year Luther’s own Augustinian order held a provincial synod at Wittenberg, in which they formally threw open the doors of the monasteries, and permitted all who desired it to return to the world, declaring that in Christ there was no distinction between Jew and Greek, monk and layman, and that a vow in opposition to the gospel was no vow, but an impiety. Ceremonies, observances, and dress were pronounced futile; those who chose to abide by the established rule were free to do so, but their preferences were not to be a law to their fellows. Those who were fitted for preaching the word were advised to depart; those who remained were obliged to perform the manual labor which had been so prominent a portion of primæval Teutonic monasticism, and mendicancy was strictly forbidden. In a few short and simple canons a radical rebellion thus declared itself in the heart of an ancient and powerful order, and principles were promulgated which were totally at variance with sacerdotalism in all its protean forms.[1058]
This broad spirit of toleration did not suit the views of the more progressive reformers. In Luther’s own Augustinian convent at Wittenberg, one of his most zealous adherents, Gabriel Zwilling, preached against monachism in general, taking the ground that salvation required the renunciation of their vows by all who had been ensnared into assuming the cowl; and so great was his success that thirteen monks at once abandoned the convent. Yet even on Luther’s return to Wittenberg, he at first took no part in the movement. He retained his Augustinian habit, and continued his residence in the convent; but before the close of the year (1522) he put forth his work, “De Votis Monasticis,” in which he fully and finally adopted the views of his friends, and showed himself as an uncompromising enemy of monasticism.[1059] How difficult it was for him, however, to shake off the habitudes in which he had been trained is shown by the fact that, even at the end of 1523, he still sometimes preached in his cowl and sometimes without it.[1060]
Notwithstanding the zealous opposition of the orthodox ecclesiastical authorities, the doctrine and practice of Wittenberg were not long in finding earnest defenders and imitators. But few such marriages, it is true, are recorded in 1522, although Balthazar Sturmius, an Augustinian monk of Saxony, committed the bolder indiscretion of marrying a widow of Franconia. In that year, however, we find Franz von Sickingen, knight-errant and condottiero, who was then a power in the state, advocating the emancipation and marriage of the religious orders, in a letter to his father-in-law, Diedrich von Henthschuchsheym. Still more important was the movement inaugurated in Switzerland by Ulrich Zwingli, who, with ten other monks of Nôtre-Dame-des-Hermites, on the 2d of July, 1522, addressed to Hugo von Hohenlandemberg, Bishop of Constance, a petition requesting the privilege of marriage. The petitioners boldly argued the matter, citing the usual Scriptural authorities, and adjured the bishop in the most pressing terms to grant their request. They warned him that a refusal might entail ruinous disorders on the whole sacerdotal body, and that, unless he seized the opportunity to guide the movement, it might speedily assume a most disastrous shape. They asserted, indeed, that not only in Switzerland, but elsewhere, it was generally believed that a majority of ecclesiastics had already chosen their future wives, and that a return to the old order of things was beyond the power of man to accomplish.[1061]
In this assertion, Zwingli and his companions followed perhaps rather the dictates of their hopes than of their judgment, for the revolution was by no means as universal or immediate as their threats or warnings would indicate. Its progress, nevertheless, was rapid and decided. Luther, whom we have seen, in the earlier part of 1522, still giving but a qualified assent to the daring innovation of his followers, in February, 1523, wrote to Spalatin in favor of a married pastor who was seeking preferment at the hands of the Elector Frederic;[1062] and in April, 1523, he himself officiated and preached a sermon in favor of matrimony to a multitude of distinguished friends at the wedding of Wenceslas Link, vicar of the Augustinian order, one of his oldest and most valued supporters, who had stood unflinchingly by him when arraigned by Cardinal Caietano before the Emperor Maximilian at the Diet of Augsburg.[1063] Not less important was the countenance given to the innovation, two days later, by the Elector Frederic, who consented to act as sponsor at the baptism of the first-born of Franz Gunther, pastor of Loch;[1064] the ceremony being performed by the honest chronicler Spalatin himself.
It is curious to see in Spalatin’s diary how each successive marriage is recorded as a matter of the utmost interest, the hopes of the reformers being strengthened by every accession to the ranks of those who dared to defy the rules which had been deemed irreversible for centuries. Nor was it an act without danger, for no open rupture had as yet taken place between the temporal power of any state and the central authority at Rome. Even in Electoral Saxony, though Duke Frederic, by a cautious course of passive resistance, afforded protection to the heretics, yet he still considered himself a Catholic, and the ritual of his chapel was unaltered. Elsewhere the ecclesiastical power was bent on asserting its supremacy over the licentious apostates who ventured to sully their vows and prostitute the sacrament of marriage by their incestuous unions. The old charge of promiscuous intercourse was resorted to in their case, as it has been with almost every heresy in every age, for the purpose of exciting popular odium,[1065] and wherever the discipline of the church could be enforced, it was done unsparingly. The temper of these endeavors to repress the movement is well illustrated by the regulations promulgated under the authority of the Cardinal-legate Campeggi, when, in 1524, he succeeded in uniting a number of reactionary princes at the Assembly of Ratisbon. Deploring the sacrilege committed in the marriages of priests and monks, which were becoming extremely common, he granted permission to the secular powers to seize all such apostates and deliver them to the ecclesiastical officials, significantly restraining them, however, from inflicting torture. The officials were empowered to condemn the offenders to perpetual imprisonment, or to hand them over to the secular arm—a decent euphuism for a frightful death; and any negligence on the part of the ordinaries exposed those officers to the pains and penalties of heresy.[1066]
In spite of all this, however, the votaries of marriage had the support and sympathy of the great body of the people. It shows how widely diffused and strongly implanted was the conviction of the evils of celibacy, when those who four centuries earlier had so cruelly persecuted their pastors for not discarding their wives now urged them to marriage, and were ready to protect them from the consequences of the act. Thus, during the summer of 1524, Wolfgang Fabricius Capito, provost of St. Thomas and priest of the church of St. Peter at Strassburg, whom we have seen two years earlier prosecuting a married priest, took to himself a wife, by the request of his parishioners, and when the chapter of canons endeavored to interfere with him, the threatening aspect of the populace warned them to desist. Nor was this the only case, for Bishop William undertook to excommunicate all the married priests of Strassburg, when the senate of the city resolutely espoused their cause, and even the authority of the legate Campeggi could not reconcile the quarrel.[1067]