§ 144.3. Anhalt, A.D. 1597.—After the death of Prince Joachim Ernest four Anhalt dynasties were formed by his sons, Dessau, Bemburg, Köthen, Zerbst. John George, first head of the family of Anhalt-Dessau, reigned on behalf of his brothers, who had not yet come of age, from A.D. 1587 till A.D. 1603, and married a daughter of John Casimir, the count-palatine. After having refused to sign the Formula of Concord, he began the Calvinization of the land in A.D. 1589 by striking out the exorcism, and then, in A.D. 1596, he put the Reformed church order in place of the Lutheran. Soon after this Luther’s catechism was set aside, and in A.D. 1597 a document was produced, consisting of twenty-eight Calvinistic articles with a modified doctrine of predestination, which all the pastors under pain of banishment from the country, were required to subscribe. The most active agents in this movement were Caspar Peucer (§ [141, 10]), who had been expelled from Wittenberg, and the superintendent Wolfgang Amling of Zerbst. In A.D. 1644, however, Anhalt-Zerbst returned to the old Lutheran Confession, under Prince John, who had been trained up by his mother in the Lutheran faith.
III. The Deformation.
§ 145. Character of the Deformation.
That in a spiritual movement so powerful as that which the Reformation called forth enthusiasts and extremists of various sorts should seek to push forward their fancies and vagaries is nothing more than might have been expected. But that such excrescences are not to be charged against the Reformation, as constituting an essential part of it, may be shown from the way in which the Reformation and the Deformation are constantly put in antagonism with one another. The starting point is clearly the same in the one case as in the other; namely, opposition to and revolt against the debased condition of the church of the age. But the Reformation distinguishes itself completely from the very first from the Deformation, often joins its forces even with those of Catholicism in order to secure the overthrow of what it regarded as a false and dangerous development; and so generally we find the champions of that movement manifesting as bitter a hatred toward the Protestant reformers as toward the Romanists. Its origin is to be explained by the tendency inherent in human nature, when once embarked on a course of opposition, to rush to the extreme of radicalism, which showed itself in this case partly in the form of rationalism, partly in the form of mysticism. The Reformation recognised the word of God in Holy Scripture as the only rule and standard in matters of religion, and as a judge and arbiter over tradition. The rationalistic spirit in the deformatory movement, on the other hand, subordinates Holy Scripture to reason, and estimates revealed truth in accordance with the supposed requirement of logical thought. The Reformation offers opposition to the Catholic deification of the church, but the Deformation goes the length of contesting the divinity of Christ (Antitrinitarians and Unitarians). On the other hand, the mystical side of the Deformation, which not infrequently amounts to a more or less clearly expressed pantheism, may be regarded as an extreme and exaggerated statement of the reformers’ demand for a more spiritual conception of the religious life in opposition to the externalism of Romanism. It places alongside of the word as expressed in Holy Scripture what it calls an inner illumination by the Holy Spirit as an equally high or even a higher kind of revelation, despises the sacraments, as well as all public or external forms of Divine worship. A third deformatory tendency, and that indeed which during the Reformation era was most powerful, is represented by Anabaptism. The ultra-reformatory endeavours of the movement aimed, not only at directing the private and ecclesiastical life of the individual Christian, but also at reconstructing, according to what it regarded as the apostolic standard, the whole fabric of the social and civil life. It derived its name from the demand for rebaptism which was made as a consequence of the denial of the usefulness and validity of infant baptism. This was, indeed, the one common term of its confession, in which its members, giving way in many directions to individualistic subjective peculiarities, were required to agree. Adult baptism was thus made the characteristic note of their community as a distinct sect.
The Catholic notions prevailing during the Middle Ages as to the manner in which heretics ought to be treated were so firmly held by the Protestants, that even Calvin without hesitation, in A.D. 1553, delivered over one who denied the doctrine of the Trinity (§ [148, 2]) to be punished by the civil authorities. Their sentence of death by fire at the stake was carried out under his sanction and that of almost all the notable reformers of the day, Bullinger and Farel, Beza and Viret, Œcolampadius, Bucer, and Peter Martyr, even Melanchthon and Urbanus Rhegius. At an earlier period indeed Luther had occasionally, roused to indignation by what he beheld of the horrors of the Inquisition, opposed the idea that heretics as such should be punished with torture and death, and gradually he secured the victory in Protestant theory and practice for the view that heretics as such should neither be compelled to retract nor be put to death, but rather should be brought to a better mind and put out of the way of doing harm by imprisonment or banishment.
§ 146. Mysticism and Pantheism.
Besides the true evangelical mysticism within the church, which Luther throughout his whole life esteemed very highly as a deepening of the Christian religious life, and which the Lutheran church had never ruled out of its pale, an unevangelical as well as thoroughly anti-ecclesiastical mysticism broke out at a very early period in quite a multitude of different forms. In the case of Schwenkfeld this tendency, though characterized by very decided hostility to the church, occupied an advantageous position, as well by the attitude which it assumed to theology as from the quiet and sober manner in which it conducted its propaganda. Agrippa and Paracelsus are representatives of a mysticism with a basis in natural philosophy, which was wrought out into fantastic forms by Valentine Weigel in his theosophy. Sebastian Franck drew his mysticism from the fountains of Eckhart’s and Tauler’s writings; and Giordano Bruno, by his wild, almost delirious mysticism, culminating in the boldest pantheism, won for himself the fiery stake. The French Libertins spirituels embraced a sublime antinomian pantheism, while the Familists, who appeared at a later period in England, were banded together in the service of an apotheosis of love like the members of one family.
§ 146.1. Schwenkfeld and his Followers.—Among the mystics of the Reformation period hostile to the church, Caspar Schwenkfeld, a Silesian nobleman of an old family, of the line of Ossingk, holds a prominent and honourable place as a man of deep and genuine piety. At first he attached himself with enthusiasm to the Wittenberg Reformation; but as it advanced his heart, which was exclusively set upon an inward, mystical Christianity, became dissatisfied. In A.D. 1525 he met personally with Luther at Wittenberg. The friendly relations that were maintained there, notwithstanding all the divergences that became apparent on fundamental matters and in the way of looking at things, soon gave place on Schwenkfeld’s side to open antagonism. He expressed himself strongly in reference to his dissatisfaction with the Wittenberg reformers, saying that he would rather join the papists than the Lutherans. Even in A.D. 1528 he had been expelled from his native land, and now began operations at Strassburg, where Bucer opposed him; and then, in A.D. 1534, in Swabia, where he encountered the vigorous opposition of Jac. Andreä. In every place he set himself in direct antagonism, not only to the German, but also to the Swiss reformers, and engaged in incessant controversies with the theologians, working steadily in the interests of a reformation in accordance with his own peculiar views. He died in A.D. 1561 at Ulm, and left behind him in Swabia and Silesia a handful of followers, who, in A.D. 1563, issued a complete edition of the “Christian Orthodox Books and Writings of the Noble and Faithful Man, Caspar Schwenkfeld,” in four folio volumes. Expelled from Silesia in A.D. 1728, many of them fled into the neighbouring state of Lausitz, others to Pennsylvania in North America, where they found some small communities. What Schwenkfeld so keenly objected to in the Lutheran Reformation was nothing else than its firm biblico-ecclesiastical objectivity. Luther’s adherence to the unconditional authority of the word of God he declared to be a worship of the letter. He himself gave to the inner word of God’s Spirit in men a place superior to the outward word of God in Scripture. All external institutions of the church met with his most uncompromising opposition. In a manner similar to that of Osiander (§ [141, 2]), he identified justification and sanctification, and explained it as an incarnation of Christ in the believer. Rejecting the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum, he taught a thorough “deifying of the flesh of Christ,” having its foundation in the birth by the Virgin Mary, regenerated in faith and completed by suffering, death, and resurrection; so that in His state of exaltation His Divine and human natures are perfectly combined into one. Infant baptism he condemned, and affirmed that a regenerate person can live without sin. In the Lord’s Supper according to him everything depended upon the inward operation of the Spirit. The bread in the sacrament is only a symbol of the spiritual truth that Christ is the true bread for the soul.He laid special emphasis on John vi. 51, and regarded the τοῦτο of the words of institution not as the subject but as the predicate: “My body is this;” i.e. is bread unto eternal life.[416]
§ 146.2. Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Weigel.—Agrippa von Nettesheim, who died in A.D. 1535, a man of extensive and varied scholarship, who boasted of his knowledge of secret things, led an exceedingly changeful and adventurous career as a statesman and soldier, taught medicine, theology, and jurisprudence, lashed the monks with his biting satires, so that they had him persecuted as a heretic, contended against the belief in witchcraft, exposed mercilessly in his treatise De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum the weak points of the dominant scholasticism, and in opposition to it wrought out in his book De occulta philosophia his own system of cabbalistic mystical philosophy.—A man of a quite similar type was the learned Swiss physician Philip Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus of Hohenheim, who died in A.D. 1541; a man of genius and a profound thinker, but with an ill-regulated imagination and an over-luxuriant fancy, which led him to profess that he had found the solution of all the mysteries of the Divine nature, as well as of terrestrial and super-terrestrial nature, and that he had discovered the philosopher’s stone. These two continued to retain their position within the limits of the Catholic church.—Valentine Weigel, on the contrary, who died in A.D. 1588, was a Lutheran pastor at Schopau in Saxony, universally respected for his consistent, godly character and his earnest, devoted labours. His mystico-theosophical tendency, influenced by Tauler and Paracelsus, came to be fully understood only long after his death by the publication of his practical works, “Church and House Postils on the Gospels,” “A Book on Prayer,” “A Directory for Attaining the Knowledge of all things without Error,” etc.; and down to the nineteenth century he had many followers among the quiet and contemplative throughout the land. While utterly depreciating as well the theology of the church as all sorts of external forms in worship, he placed all the more weight upon the inner light and the anointing with the Spirit of God, without which all teaching and prayer will be vain. In man he sees a microcosmus of the universe, and man’s growth in holiness he regarded as a continuation of the incarnation of God in him. He still allowed a place to the doctrine of the church as an allegorical shell for the knowledge of the soul to God and the world, and from this it may be explained how he was able unhesitatingly to subscribe the Formula of Concord. Bened. Biedermann, who was for a long time his deacon, and then his successor in the pastoral office, sympathised with his master’s views, and subsequently made vigorous attempts to disseminate them in his writings.On this account he was deposed in A.D. 1660.[417]