CHAPTER I
THE MAIN CURRENT OF THE REFORMATION
I
One of the greatest tragedies in Christian history is the division of forces which occurred in the Reformation movements of the sixteenth century. Division of forces in the supreme spiritual undertakings of the race is of course confined to no one century and to no one movement; it is a very ancient tragedy. But the tragedy of division is often relieved by the fact that through the differentiation of opposing parties a vigorous emphasis is placed upon aspects of truth which might otherwise have been allowed to drop out of focus. This sixteenth-century division is peculiarly tragic, because through the split in the lines the very aspects of truth which were most needed to give the movement a steady increment of insight and power were lost in the din and confusion of party warfare.
There was a short but glorious period—the years from 1517 to 1523—during which it seemed as though the spiritual and intellectual travail of the three preceding centuries was to consummate in the birth of a movement that would draw together and unify all the liberating forces which had slowly become available. The Humanists of the Renaissance, no less than Columbus, were finding a new world.[1] They had boldly travelled out beyond the {2} boundaries which the medieval mind had set to human interests, and had discovered that man was more than the abstract being whose "soul" had alone concerned ecclesiastics and schoolmen. Man, the Humanists saw, is possessed in his own right of great powers of reason. He is a creative and autonomous being, he has vast capacities for life and enjoyment to which the Church had failed to minister. They stood amazed at the artistic and literary culture, the political and intellectual freedom and the great richness of life which the newly discovered classical literature revealed as having existed in the pre-Christian world, and at the wonderful comprehension of life revealed in the Gospels. With commendable passion they proposed to refresh and reshape the world through the new models, the new ideals, and the new spirit which they had discovered. First of all they would wipe out the old Augustinian cleavage which had carried its sharp dualism wherever it ran. They would no longer recognize the double world scheme—a divine realm set over against an undivine realm, the "sacred" set over against the "secular," the spiritual set over against the natural, the Church set against the world, faith set in contrast to reason, the spirit pitted against the flesh, "the other world" put in such light that "this world" by contrast lay dull in the shadow. Those who were broadened and liberated by the new learning found not only a new world in classical literature, but they also found a new gospel in the Gospel. As they studied the New Testament documents themselves and became freed from the bondage of tradition they discovered that the primitive message dealt with life and action rather than with theology. They found the key to the Gospel in the Sermon on the Mount, and in the Parables of Jesus, and they shifted the emphasis from doctrine to ethics. This change of emphasis quite naturally involved another change. It brought man into greater prominence, and the Church as an ecclesiastical system into less prominence; for life, they discovered, was settled in the teaching of Christ by the {3} attitude of the will and by the formation of character, rather than by the mediation of a priesthood external to man. "I wish," Erasmus wrote to Capito in 1518, "that there could be an end of scholastic subtleties, or, if not an end, that they could be thrust into a second place and Christ be taught plainly and simply. The reading of the Bible and the early Fathers will have this effect. Doctrines are taught now which have no affinity with Christ, and only darken our eyes."[2] Again in 1521 he wrote to a friend, words which appear again and again in his letters: "It would be well for us if we thought less about our dogmas and more about the gospel,"[3] or, as he often puts it, "if we made less of dogmatic subtleties and more of Scripture." So far as Humanism was a religious force it was pushing toward a religion of the lay-type, with man himself—man with his momentous will—as the centre of interest.
Another important influence was slowly but pervasively filtering down into the life of the people and preparing the way for a religion of greater personal vitality and spiritual inwardness; I mean the testimony of the great mystics. One has only to study the life and writings of such a scholar as Nicolaus Chrypffs—generally called Cusanus, or Nicholas of Cusa—who died shortly before Luther was born,[4] to see what a live force the mystical teaching was even in this period of Renaissance. God is for him, as for his great masters, Plotinus, Erigena, Eckhart, and Tauler, the infinite and indescribable subsoil of the universe, in whose Reality all the roots of life and all the reality of things are grounded. The soul, by nature spiritual and immortal, at its apex rises above the contradictions which lower knowledge everywhere meets and comes into possession, by a "learned ignorance," of Truth itself and into an unspeakable union with God. But it was not merely among scholars like Nicholas that mysticism formed the elemental basis of life and thought; it had, through the circles of the {4} "Brothers of the Common Life,"[5] and through such masterpieces as the Imitation of Christ, the Theologia Germanica, and the Sermons of Eckhart and of John Tauler, become a part of the spiritual atmosphere which serious-minded men breathed. Every one of the men who belong in my list of "Spiritual Reformers" read and loved "the golden book of German Theology," and most of them knew the other writings of the great fourteenth-century mystics. There are unmistakable evidences of a subtle formative influence from these rich sources, which explains the simultaneous sporadic outbreak of similar views in widely sundered places.
There was, thus, abroad at the opening of the Reformation a deep yearning among serious people for a religion of inward experience, a religion based not on proof-texts nor on external authority of any kind, but on the native capacity of the soul to seek, to find and to enjoy the living God who is the Root and Sap of every twig and branch of the great tree of life. The general trend of this mystical tendency, as also of the Humanistic movement, was in the direction of lay-religion, and both movements alike emphasized the inherent and native capacity of man, whose destiny by his free choice is in his own hands.
There were, too, at work many other deep-lying tendencies away from the bondage and traditions of the past; aspiration for economic and social reforms to liberate the common people and give them some real chance to be persons—tendencies which all the Reformers treated in this book deeply felt and shared.
All these movements toward intellectual, spiritual, and social freedom seemed at first to find their champion in the dynamic hero, whose ninety-five theses on the door at Wittenberg shook the world awake in 1517. He was by birth and spirit a child of the people—"ein Kind des Volkes"—and he seemed to be a prophet, divinely called to voice their dumb aspirations. He possessed, {5} like all great prophets, a straightforward moral honesty and sincerity, an absolute fearlessness, a magnetic and commanding personality, an unusual mastery of the vernacular speech, and an abundant power of pathos, humour, and satire. All the world loves a hero who can say in the face of real danger, "I would go forward to Worms if there were as many devils there as there are tiles on the roof!" or again, "I would go to Leipzig if it rained Duke Georges for nine days running!"[6]
He had, too, unusual religious depth and power which sprang, as in the case of the great mystics, from a profound inward experience. Luther, like St. Paul and St. Augustine, and many another spiritual guide of the race, came upon his supreme insights in sudden epoch-making revelations or illuminations by which he found himself on a new level, with the line of march shifted and all values altered. His conversion and dedication to religion was an instance of this type. So, too, was his discovery of the way of Faith. Legend has very likely coloured our accounts of this experience, but for purposes of valuation it is of little moment to us whether the dynamic flash came to him in his cell at Wittenberg as he was studying the Epistle to the Romans, or whether it came while he was climbing the penitential stairway in Rome.[7] When all legendary coverings are stripped away we have left an inner event of the first importance, a live idea bursting into consciousness like a new star on the field of vision. By processes much deeper and richer than those of logical argument, his mind leaped to the certainty of infinite grace and forgiving love in God as revealed in Christ. In a word, this baffled and despairing monk, striving in vain to heap up merits enough to win {6} divine favour, suddenly discovered a new God who filled his whole world with a new light and freedom and joy. His name for this discovery was Faith ["Glaube">[, but Faith in its first intention for Luther meant a personal experience or discovery of God, brought into full view and clear apprehension in Christ. "No one can understand God or God's Word," Luther once wrote, "unless he has it revealed immediately ["on Mittel">[ by the Holy Ghost, but nobody can receive anything from the Holy Ghost unless he experiences it. In experience the Holy Ghost teaches as in His own school, outside of which nothing of value can be learned."[8]