A Short History of Christianity / Second Edition, Revised, With Additions

by J. M. Robertson

Heretical forces of course there were, several of the leading sects of the fourteenth century being still active, especially in Germany and the Low Countries. Thus the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit, who leant to pantheism in doctrine and to some degree of antinomianism in practice, persisted in spite of persecution, as did the kindred movements of Beghards or Turlupins; members of these and similar sects even found shelter in the lower orders of the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians; and in Italy and France the heretical Franciscan Fraticelli still obstinately fought the papacy, which followed them up with fire and sword. But there are no signs that the papacy had thus far been shaken; and more than one anti-clerical movement had died out. Thus in England Lollardry had virtually disappeared in the reign of Henry VI; and in Bohemia, where the Wiclifian John Huss in the opening years of the century had preached vehemently against clerical and papal abuses, not only had he been burned alive on the sentence of the Council of Constance (1415), in iniquitous disregard of the emperor’s letter of safe-conduct, but his followers, after long and savage wars in which great numbers were burned alive and they themselves broke up into two sections, had finally been either reconciled to the Church or reduced to peaceful nonconformity.

Nowhere could the anti-papal spirit be said to be dangerously strong; nor was it much regarded by the popes. A little earlier than Huss, Matthew of Cracow, Bishop of Worms, had written “On the Pollutions (de squaloribus) of the Roman Curia,” but he was never molested. It does not seem, further, that the cause of the cruel sentence on Huss was so much his attacks on the clergy or the papacy as the enmities he had aroused (1) in what passed for philosophy (he being a zealous “Realist,” and as such hated by the “Nominalists,”[1] who were strong in the Council) and (2) on the side of nationality, he being a Czech nationalist and a vehement enemy of the German race and interest, which also were present in force. And though the cruelty and the gross treachery of the sentence on Huss, and the infliction of the same cruel death on Jerome of Prague in the following year, roused a furious revolt among the Hussites, these outrages awoke no general sympathy in Europe.

As the fifteenth century wore on, fresh movements of anti-papal feeling rose, and some were put down. A professor of theology at the university of Erfurt, John of Wesel (not to be confounded with John Wessel, also a critical reformer in theology, but never persecuted), began about the middle of the century to write against indulgences; and when he became a popular preacher at Mayence and Worms he carried his criticism further. The result was that in 1479 he was arraigned before a “court of Inquisition” at Mayence and cast into prison, where he soon died. Wesel was a Nominalist, and as such was no less hated by the Realists than Huss had been by the Nominalists; but since he was also denounced as a Hussite, and was further an extremely free-tongued assailant of the hierarchy, there is reason in his case to suppose a professional animus. Still there was no formidable movement. Before John of Wesel, the Netherlander John of Goch, Confessor to the Nuns of Tabor (d. 1475), had opposed both monasticism and episcopal power; but he was associated with the orthodox Brethren of the Common Lot, and had criticized the antinomian morals of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, so that he hardly figured as a heretic. John Wessel, again (d. 1489), anticipated, as Luther declared, most of the latter’s doctrines; but though he wandered in France and Italy, studied and taught at Paris, and was a professor at Heidelberg, exercising a wide influence, he never roused enmity enough to bring him into trouble. On the other hand, Savonarola’s strong dissentient movement at Florence, as we have already noted, fell with him in 1498.

All the while, nevertheless, there was proceeding an intellectual process which had not before been possible—a permeation of the northern part of the continent, especially Germany, by a spirit of comparatively orthodox anti-Romanism, based on a growing scholarship, which found in the sacred books themselves a basis for its course. The scholarly impulse had come from Italy, where it had been fostered by the papacy itself; but in the north it had a different social and political effect. In Germany and the Netherlands, to begin with, elementary education was gaining ground. The Brethren of the Common Lot had done much for it, and many of their pupils started fresh schools, which weakened the first, but carried further their work. At the same time sprang up new universities; those of Tübingen, Mayence, Wittemberg, and Frankfort-on-the-Oder being founded between 1477 and 1506. In the higher Biblical scholarship, further, there had begun a new era. Laurentius Valla’s Notes on the New Testament created a spirit of scholarlike criticism; and John Reuchlin, after a training in France, began in Germany an equally vigorous movement of Hebrew scholarship by producing the first Hebrew grammar. Numbers of educated men were now in a position of intellectual superiority to the great mass of the clergy; and all the while the process of translating the New Testament or the gospels into the modern languages for the use of the unlearned was going on in all the more civilized countries. There were German translations before Luther; Wiclif’s versions had been current in England among the Lollards; and French and Italian versions had been made by several hands in the fifteenth century. The important result was that anti-clerical heresy began to claim to be the stricter orthodoxy, and the Church could no longer bracket the sin of anti-clericalism with that of rejecting the leading Christian dogmas. Thus, when Erasmus of Rotterdam began with a new and remarkable literary skill to write Latin satires on the old text of the vices and ignorance of the monks and other clergy, he had such an audience as no man had yet had on that theme. In Petrarch’s day, a century before, though he too had exclaimed like every other educated layman at the corruption of the papal court and system, humanist literature was still largely a matter of exquisite art for art’s sake; in that of Erasmus it had begun to handle the most vital intellectual and moral interests.

Yet, though such an intellectual ferment was a condition precedent of the Reformation, it was not the proximate cause of the explosion. The doctrinal movement is seen at its strongest after Luther’s disruptive work had been done, in the allied movement set up in France by Calvinism. More perhaps than in Geneva itself, the Huguenot cause in France was one of moral and intellectual revolt, certainly fanatical but in large measure disinterested. What precipitated the Reformation in Germany was the coalition of the decisive economic interest of the self-seeking nobles, and the anti-Roman national sentiment of the people, with the moral and doctrinal appeal of Luther.

§ 2. Political and Economic Forces

Even the grievance of indulgence-selling, which gave the immediate impulse to Luther’s action, was an economic as well as a moral question. Many of the best Catholics were entirely at one with him and such of his predecessors as Wesel and Wessel in deploring and denouncing the form the traffic had taken. The process of farming out the sale of indulgences to districts, as governments farmed out the taxes, was enough to stagger all men capable of independent judgment; and the expedition of the Dominican monk Tetzel had reduced it to something like burlesque. Yet it was typical of what papal administration had become. Archbishop Albert of Mayence and Magdeburg, who was also margrave of Brandenburg, owed the pope the usual large sum for his investiture, and could not pay. The pope, Leo X, greatly needed money for his building outlays; and the supreme prince of the Church gave to the lesser permission to set up in his province a vigorous trade in indulgences. For this trade Tetzel was selected, not by the pope but by the archbishop, as a notoriously suitable tool. Albert in turn made a financial arrangement with the great German banking house of Fuggers, and their agent accompanied Tetzel to take care of the cash. Thus, though the transaction was strictly a German one, the procedure was externally one of bleeding a German province, through its superstition, in the financial interest of Rome. Well-informed people knew that the papal agent carried off at least the archbishop’s debt; and others might plausibly surmise that there had gone a million thalers more, as the takings had been abnormally great.

Obviously the mass of the citizens were superstitious believers, otherwise the traffic could not have gone on; and Luther in his pulpit began merely by opposing the abuse of the practice, not the canonical principle. In absolution, he correctly argued, there were according to the established doctrine three elements—contrition, confession, and remission of penalties; and indulgences could effect only the third. He accordingly refused to absolve any on the mere ground of an indulgence; whereupon Tetzel, finding his traffic thus ostensibly hampered, preached against him, and the historic battle began. The theses nailed to the Wittemberg church door by Luther (1517) did not assail the Church or the pope; they simply challenged on orthodox lines the abuse of indulgences; and when Luther began to publish his views he expressed himself with perfect submission to the pope.

What won him the support of a vigorous popular party, albeit a minority, and of a sufficient section of the nobility, was in the first place his courage, and in the second place the growing restiveness of the Germans as such under what was practically an Italian domination. In past history, the “Germanic empire” had been wont to lord it over Italy on feudal grounds, and it was always a sore point with many that Italy none the less received an increasing tribute from Germany as from other States. The blunder of the papacy in Luther’s case lay in not realizing how far such feelings, in connection with a fresh scandal, might go in setting up a northern tide of anti-Roman animus. So long wont to brow-beat all insubordination, and to decide doctrinal disputes by fiat instead of by persuasion, it either prescribed or permitted to its agents the usual tone in their dealings with Luther; and finally the pope thought to clinch matters by a bull (1520) against his doctrines, giving him his choice between submission and excommunication. His defiance, and the act of excommunication, duly followed, and the Protestant Church began.