Christianity - The First Three Thousand Years Part 10

The university owed its existence to the then head of the Wettin dynasty, Friedrich of Saxony, a strong-minded and creative ruler, by hereditary right one of seven electors, who chose a new Holy Roman Emperor when required (the imperial t.i.tle had never become hereditary). That honour gave Friedrich a good deal of influence on the Habsburg dynasty, who since the early fifteenth century had normally provided one of their number as the next emperor, but who could never be certain that the electors would allow this to continue. Without the Elector Friedrich's support (puzzling in its consistency - he did not know Martin Luther well and never approved of his religious revolution), it is likely that Luther would have suffered the fate of Jan Hus a century before, burned by the authority of the Church. The Wettin were hugely wealthy from the profits of mining, particularly mining for silver, and one of the justifications for Friedrich's later nickname 'the Wise' was the constructive uses to which he had put his generous inheritance, especially the improvement of the little market town at the gates of his palace in Wittenberg. Some of his spending was what was expected of a medieval prince, like the beautiful music which he sponsored in the Castle Church, or the large collection of holy relics which he also a.s.sembled there, all lovingly listed for pious visitors in a printed catalogue. The foundation of the university was less conventional. The first in Germany to be founded without the blessing of the Church authorities, it brashly boasted against its older rivals that it could provide students with an up-to-date immersion in humanist learning.2 The lecturer who arrived in 1511, nine years after Friedrich had founded the university, came from the sort of family who provided most of the Western Church's most effective clergy: not especially rich or endowed with long pedigrees, but hard-working and high-achieving. Martin Luther's father made his money in the mining industry, and with a miner for a father, Luther was p.r.o.ne in later years to emphasize his credentials as a man of the people. In fact his mother's family boasted more than one successful graduate. It was only natural for Hans Luther to direct his son towards graduate study to become a lawyer, but Martin struck out in his own direction into the religious life, after an incident which, if he had become a saint of the Catholic Church, would have been the perfect opening for hagiography in a traditional mould. Caught in a thunderstorm in 1505, the young man was so terrified that he vowed to St Anne, the mother of Mary, that he would enter monastic life if he survived. When the storm was over, he kept his vow to that apocryphal lady (a useful ally against any parental opposition, since she was the patron saint of his father's mining industry, as well as being maternal grandmother of G.o.d). Martin Luther moved only a little way down the road from his college in Erfurt to the house of the strict monastic Order of Augustinian Eremites; it was they who sent him to Wittenberg.

Perhaps it was his order's devotion to Augustine that directed Luther to his fresh perception of Augustine's views on salvation and grace, but he was hardly alone around the turn of the century in returning to Augustine's grand narrative of human helplessness remedied by divine mercy. Luther was not a conventional humanist.3 There was little in his theology as it developed which suggested the optimism and sense of boundless possibility which characterized so much humanist learning. Yet as he worked out a theology of salvation which echoed Augustine's exposition of Paul, humanist techniques of scholars.h.i.+p constantly prompted him to challenge scholasticism. Increasingly openly, he despised the scholastic tradition both Thomist and nominalist: he loathed the presence of Aristotle in scholastic theological discussion, and he came to despise the nominalist idea of a salvation contract between G.o.d and humanity which Gabriel Biel had pioneered (see pp. 565-6). In 1513 he began lecturing on the Psalter, a natural choice for a monk who structured his daily life around the chanting of the psalms. To help his students, he had a batch of psalters printed with the text broadly s.p.a.ced surrounded by wide blank margins, so that they could make their notes around the text as he spoke. Absent was all the medieval commentary, that ready-made lens through which students would have been expected to view the Bible, forcing them to look afresh at the text itself. There was little in his theology as it developed which suggested the optimism and sense of boundless possibility which characterized so much humanist learning. Yet as he worked out a theology of salvation which echoed Augustine's exposition of Paul, humanist techniques of scholars.h.i.+p constantly prompted him to challenge scholasticism. Increasingly openly, he despised the scholastic tradition both Thomist and nominalist: he loathed the presence of Aristotle in scholastic theological discussion, and he came to despise the nominalist idea of a salvation contract between G.o.d and humanity which Gabriel Biel had pioneered (see pp. 565-6). In 1513 he began lecturing on the Psalter, a natural choice for a monk who structured his daily life around the chanting of the psalms. To help his students, he had a batch of psalters printed with the text broadly s.p.a.ced surrounded by wide blank margins, so that they could make their notes around the text as he spoke. Absent was all the medieval commentary, that ready-made lens through which students would have been expected to view the Bible, forcing them to look afresh at the text itself.4 In 1515 Luther moved to lecturing on Paul's letter to the Romans, so central a text for Augustine's message about salvation. It is worth noting that this took place before Erasmus had published his edition of the New Testament, and so it owed nothing to that monument to humanist learning. Luther discovered good news there for himself: an 'evangelical' message, direct as he saw it in the evangelium evangelium. His own ma.n.u.script notes survive from these two lecture courses and in them themes appear which later coalesced behind his proclamation of justification by faith: his presentation of the psalms as a meditation on the message and significance of Jesus Christ, his affirmation that all righteousness comes from G.o.d, his pointers to the revelation in the words of scripture, a revelation dwarfing any truths provided by human reason. When Luther turned to Romans, at the heart of his presentation of the message of salvation was the doctrine of predestination: 'whoever hates sin is already outside sin and belongs to the elect'. How could we get to this state without help from outside ourselves? A terrifying image in his notes underlines the plight of human beings after the Fall in the Garden of Eden: so trapped in sin that both body and spirit are twisted up claustrophobically without any escape from their agony - incurvatus in se incurvatus in se - 'turned in on themselves'. - 'turned in on themselves'.5 Whenever the Turmerlebnis Turmerlebnis occurred (in fact almost certainly after 1517), Luther remembered or reinterpreted this moment of agony resolved as a turning point forcing on him the realization that faith was central to salvation. occurred (in fact almost certainly after 1517), Luther remembered or reinterpreted this moment of agony resolved as a turning point forcing on him the realization that faith was central to salvation.6 Predictably the trigger was a text from Romans, 1.17, itself sheltering a Tanakh quotation from Habbakuk 2.4: 'the righteousness of G.o.d is revealed through faith for faith, as it is written "he who through faith is righteous shall live" '. In this sentence, the words 'righteousness/righteous' were in the Vulgate's Latin ' Predictably the trigger was a text from Romans, 1.17, itself sheltering a Tanakh quotation from Habbakuk 2.4: 'the righteousness of G.o.d is revealed through faith for faith, as it is written "he who through faith is righteous shall live" '. In this sentence, the words 'righteousness/righteous' were in the Vulgate's Latin 'just.i.tia/ justus': hence the word justification.7 In Latin that literally means making someone righteous, but in Luther's understanding - in a literally crucial difference - it rather meant declaring someone to be righteous. To use the technical language of theologians, G.o.d through his grace 'imputes' the merits of the crucified and risen Christ to a fallen human being who remains without inherent merit, and who without this 'imputation' would not be 'made' righteous at all. That is the essential contrast with the In Latin that literally means making someone righteous, but in Luther's understanding - in a literally crucial difference - it rather meant declaring someone to be righteous. To use the technical language of theologians, G.o.d through his grace 'imputes' the merits of the crucified and risen Christ to a fallen human being who remains without inherent merit, and who without this 'imputation' would not be 'made' righteous at all. That is the essential contrast with the via moderna via moderna notion of a covenant in which a merciful G.o.d allows human merit 'to do that which is in oneself'. Since the word notion of a covenant in which a merciful G.o.d allows human merit 'to do that which is in oneself'. Since the word just.i.tia just.i.tia is linked so closely with faith, as in Romans 1.17, we see how Luther constructed his evangelical notion of justification by faith from Paul's closely woven text. That was the core of his liberating good news, his Gospel. is linked so closely with faith, as in Romans 1.17, we see how Luther constructed his evangelical notion of justification by faith from Paul's closely woven text. That was the core of his liberating good news, his Gospel.

Later Luther told this story of a theological revolution as autobiography, portraying his years in the Wittenberg Augustinian monastery as tortured and unprofitable. Partly this was hindsight, given all that happened afterwards, and partly it can be accounted for by his generous efforts in later years to cheer up a long-term house guest, Jerome Weller, who suffered repeated bouts of depression, and who needed to hear about someone else who had successfully endured similar troubles.8 Luther also freely admitted that he had been a good and conscientious monk, one of the best products of the healthiest parts of the monastic system. Indeed, that was the trouble. After all his frequent anxious visits to the confessional to seek forgiveness for his (in worldly terms trivial) sins, he still felt a righteous G.o.d's fury against his sinfulness. Reminiscing later, he said that he had come to hate this G.o.d who had given laws in the Old Testament which could not be kept and which thus held humankind back from salvation. The opposition of Law and Gospel, an opposition set up by G.o.d himself, remained a fundamental theme of his theology. Luther also freely admitted that he had been a good and conscientious monk, one of the best products of the healthiest parts of the monastic system. Indeed, that was the trouble. After all his frequent anxious visits to the confessional to seek forgiveness for his (in worldly terms trivial) sins, he still felt a righteous G.o.d's fury against his sinfulness. Reminiscing later, he said that he had come to hate this G.o.d who had given laws in the Old Testament which could not be kept and which thus held humankind back from salvation. The opposition of Law and Gospel, an opposition set up by G.o.d himself, remained a fundamental theme of his theology.

Luther needed to reconstruct his own story in the light of later events because the drastic implications of his personal struggle only gradually became clear. They developed into the rediscovery of good news which has come to be called the Protestant Reformation, but which called itself, to begin with, an 'evangelical' movement. That remains the official self-description of the Lutheran Churches, in a use of this word which has separate connotations for English-speakers with their own historical references to an anglophone Christian history. What happened in the years after Luther's first lectures on Romans was a turnabout in the whole Western Christian scheme of salvation (soteriology) which had constructed that great theological success story, the doctrine of Purgatory, with all its attendant structures of intercessory prayer for the dead - chantries, gilds, hospitals - that comforting sense that through divine mercy we humans can busy ourselves doing something to alter and improve our prospects after death. In the end, for Luther and all who came to accept his new message, the problem was that it was not divine mercy upholding this system, but a lie told by clergymen. Yet to begin with, Luther did not see this; nor did he object to Purgatory. In fact he continued to accept Purgatory's existence until around 1530, when he finally realized that his soteriological revolution had abolished it (his change of mind demanded a certain amount of re-editing of some of his earlier writings).9 Instead, he seized on a lesser problem within the system: the sale of indulgences. Instead, he seized on a lesser problem within the system: the sale of indulgences.

Indulgences, the Western Church's grants remitting penitential punishments, could be seen as a practical demonstration that G.o.d loved sinners, and that G.o.d's love was channelled through the power of the Church. Yet many loyal church people and theologians had seen the commercialization of the system as vulgar and needing reform, whatever they thought of the principles behind it. Now Luther was provoked to confrontation with the Church hierarchy by a particularly reprehensible campaign, backed by Pope Leo X himself. It raised funds from the German faithful to finish rebuilding St Peter's Basilica in Rome, in a deal which also looked after the financial needs of the great Hohenzollern prelate Albrecht, Archbishop of Magdeburg. The preaching campaign for the indulgence was headed by an extrovert Dominican, Johann Tetzel, who was capable of urging his hearers, 'Won't you part with even a farthing to buy this letter? It won't bring you money but rather a divine and immortal soul, whole and secure in the Kingdom of Heaven.'10 The squalid implications of this, an insult to the Apostle Paul's view of grace and salvation, led Luther to announce (probably with a notice on the Castle Church door) that he proposed a university disputation on ninety-five theses, taking a decidedly negative view of indulgences. He enclosed these theses in a letter of 31 October 1517 to that same Albrecht, who happened to be his own archbishop. The squalid implications of this, an insult to the Apostle Paul's view of grace and salvation, led Luther to announce (probably with a notice on the Castle Church door) that he proposed a university disputation on ninety-five theses, taking a decidedly negative view of indulgences. He enclosed these theses in a letter of 31 October 1517 to that same Albrecht, who happened to be his own archbishop.

Luther's protest was quickly turned into an act of rebellion because powerful churchmen gave a heavy-handed response. He wanted to talk about grace; his opponents wanted to talk about authority. That chasm of purposes explains how an argument about a side alley of medieval soteriology escalated into the division of Europe. His own order was broadly sympathetic to his arguments, but throughout 1518 Luther's opponents relentlessly called him to be obedient to Rome, and the incendiary idea of conciliarism (see pp. 560-63) constantly hovered around their diatribes. A veteran Dominican papal theologian, Silvestro Mazzolini of Prierio (sometimes known as 'Prierias'), was commissioned to write against the ninety-five theses. He saw a familiar conciliarist enemy in Luther, and he discussed the infallibility of Church authority at such length that it made Luther much more inclined to wonder whether the Church might be fallible. Luther's meetings with Cardinal Cajetan, one of the most admirable and irreproachable of senior churchmen (see p. 583), became a fiasco for the same reason. Each confrontation made him seem more of a rebel, a reincarnation of the executed rebel Jan Hus.

Cajetan's meeting with Luther need not have ended as it did. Cajetan's immersion in the writings of Thomas Aquinas led him, like other Thomist Dominicans, to emphasize the role of predestination in salvation, an emphasis which Aquinas shared with both Augustine and the Augustinian monk of Wittenberg.11 Moreover, soon after Luther's first protest in 1517, Cajetan had decided to examine the question of indulgences for himself, and his conclusions (published later at great length) were typical of his brusquely independent thinking. While defending the existence of indulgences, he took a realistic view of their historical origins, and downplayed both the theology of merit and the proposition that the Church could control the measuring out of lengths of penance in Purgatory. Moreover, soon after Luther's first protest in 1517, Cajetan had decided to examine the question of indulgences for himself, and his conclusions (published later at great length) were typical of his brusquely independent thinking. While defending the existence of indulgences, he took a realistic view of their historical origins, and downplayed both the theology of merit and the proposition that the Church could control the measuring out of lengths of penance in Purgatory.12 Yet in 1518 this meeting of Dominican and Augustinian reformers degenerated into an angry confrontation, in which Cajetan demanded unquestioning obedience to the Pope from Luther, while Luther would not withdraw what he had said about grace. In the terms of B. B. Warfield's characterization of the Reformation as Augustine's doctrine of Grace triumphing over Augustine's doctrine of the Church (see p. 584), Cajetan prioritized Augustine on the Church over Augustine on grace. His Thomist successors in the Catholic Church continued to do so, in the Counter-Reformation (see Chapter 18), a version of Church reform which sought the destruction of the project for Christendom which Luther and his admirers now developed. Yet in 1518 this meeting of Dominican and Augustinian reformers degenerated into an angry confrontation, in which Cajetan demanded unquestioning obedience to the Pope from Luther, while Luther would not withdraw what he had said about grace. In the terms of B. B. Warfield's characterization of the Reformation as Augustine's doctrine of Grace triumphing over Augustine's doctrine of the Church (see p. 584), Cajetan prioritized Augustine on the Church over Augustine on grace. His Thomist successors in the Catholic Church continued to do so, in the Counter-Reformation (see Chapter 18), a version of Church reform which sought the destruction of the project for Christendom which Luther and his admirers now developed.

Finally in 1520 Luther found himself excommunicated, cut off by the Pope from the fellows.h.i.+p of the whole Church. He publicly burned the bull of excommunication in Wittenberg, cheered on by the students and townsfolk, to whom he had become a hero. Luther was beginning to see himself as chosen by G.o.d precisely for a heroic role: to deliver the Church from a satanic error. He had accepted his total sinfulness. This gave him a paradoxical sense of his own rightness, and if the Pope was telling him that he was wrong in proclaiming G.o.d's cause, that must mean that the Pope was G.o.d's enemy. What was worse, the Church had taken G.o.d's sacraments and turned them into part of an elaborate confidence trick on G.o.d's people. Luther proclaimed his message to all the victims of the cheat: not just to scholars in Latin but to all laypeople, powerful and humble, in German. Three great treatises in 1520, the Address to the Christian n.o.bility of the German Nation Address to the Christian n.o.bility of the German Nation, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church The Babylonian Captivity of the Church and and The Freedom of a Christian The Freedom of a Christian, stood out amid the increasing flood of Luther's polemic from the Wittenberg printing presses.

The first of these three drew on the ancient tensions between pope and emperor to proclaim that the pope was the enemy not just of the empire but of all Christendom. As imperialist spokesmen had long maintained (see p. 558), he was Antichrist, but furthermore, so was the whole apparatus of his Church. The Babylonian Captivity Babylonian Captivity addressed itself in Latin to those inside that apparatus, seeking to convince clergy that the sacraments which they administered had been perverted from their biblical forms. Above all, G.o.d's Eucharist had been turned to a Ma.s.s which falsely claimed to be a repet.i.tion of Christ's sacrifice once offered on the Cross. Luther performed something of a balancing act when he spoke of the Ma.s.s: he kept a pa.s.sionate sense of the presence of the Lord's body and blood in the eucharistic bread and wine, but he scorned the scholastic and non-biblical explanation of this miraculous transformation which the Church had provided in the doctrine of transubstantiation. The third book explored the problem of its t.i.tle: how could utterly fallen humanity, enslaved to sin, claim any liberty? Luther, never afraid of paradox, boldly gave an answer answerless: 'A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.' addressed itself in Latin to those inside that apparatus, seeking to convince clergy that the sacraments which they administered had been perverted from their biblical forms. Above all, G.o.d's Eucharist had been turned to a Ma.s.s which falsely claimed to be a repet.i.tion of Christ's sacrifice once offered on the Cross. Luther performed something of a balancing act when he spoke of the Ma.s.s: he kept a pa.s.sionate sense of the presence of the Lord's body and blood in the eucharistic bread and wine, but he scorned the scholastic and non-biblical explanation of this miraculous transformation which the Church had provided in the doctrine of transubstantiation. The third book explored the problem of its t.i.tle: how could utterly fallen humanity, enslaved to sin, claim any liberty? Luther, never afraid of paradox, boldly gave an answer answerless: 'A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.'13 The paradox was solved by the utterly undeserved death of Christ, which gave back freedom to those whom G.o.d had chosen from amid an utterly undeserving humanity. The paradox was solved by the utterly undeserved death of Christ, which gave back freedom to those whom G.o.d had chosen from amid an utterly undeserving humanity.

What would the powers of this world make of Luther's call to liberty? Now that that Church authorities had responded, it was for the civil commonwealth to p.r.o.nounce, in the person of its most exalted representative, the Holy Roman Emperor. Charles V, elected in summer 1519 to the huge relief of the Habsburg family, was then not out of his teens, but he ruled the largest empire that the Christian West had ever known. A serious-minded young man whose sense of destiny as Christendom's leader was not diminished by his advisers (see pp. 593-4), he was anxious not to jeopardize the unity of the dominion entrusted to him, but also anxious to do what G.o.d wanted. Eventually setting aside papal protests, he heeded Friedrich the Wise and gave Luther a formal hearing within the boundaries of the empire at the first available meeting of the Diet, the regular imperial a.s.sembly, at Worms in April 1521. Luther arrived after a triumphal tour across Germany. Facing the Emperor, he acknowledged a long list of books as his own. Ordered to say yes or no to the question 'Will you then recant?' he asked for a day's grace to answer. Would he return to being the best monk in Germany, or go forward into an unformed future, guided only by what he had found in the Bible?

Luther's answer next day was no single word, but a careful and dignified speech. His books were of various sorts, some of which were indeed 'polemic against the papacy' which reflected 'the experience and the complaint of all men': 'if then, I revoke these books, all I shall achieve is to add strength to tyranny, and open not the windows but the doors to this monstrous G.o.dlessness, for a wider and freer range than it has ever dared before'. He spelled out to the Emperor that without a conviction from 'scripture or plain reason (for I believe neither in Pope nor councils alone)', he could recant nothing. It was such a momentous culmination that not long after his death, Georg Rorer, the first editor of his collected works, felt compelled to construct two tiny summary sentences in German which have become the most memorable thing Luther never said: 'Here I stand; I can do no other'.14 This can stand for the motto of all Protestants: ultimately, perhaps, of all modern Western civilization. This can stand for the motto of all Protestants: ultimately, perhaps, of all modern Western civilization.

To his great credit, Charles ignored the Emperor Sigismund's treachery to Hus in 1415 (see pp. 571-2) and honoured Luther's safe conduct from the Diet. Still Luther was in peril, and the best solution was for him to vanish; the Elector Friedrich duly arranged that. Luther occupied those months in the Wartburg, a Wettin stronghold on the wooded ma.s.sif high above Eisenach, familiar to him from his childhood, by beginning a translation of the Bible into German. It would present his own spin on the text, to make sure that his liberating message got across, but it was an astonis.h.i.+ng achievement at a time of great personal stress and amid a welter of polemical writing.15 Although time only allowed the completion of the New Testament, and the complete Old Testament followed later, his text has shaped the German language. Luther was a connoisseur of the vernacular, like his English contemporary Thomas Cranmer, whose speech has haunted formal English to the present day (see pp. 630-32), but Luther had a different gift. Cranmer's meticulously calculated liturgical prose presented a public, ceremonial face of the Reformation in restrained dignity, even sobriety, whereas Luther's talent was for seizing the emotion with sudden, urgent phrases. His hymns, first published in Wittenberg and Stra.s.sburg in 1524, reveal his genius perhaps even more than his Bible, because they transcend the notorious and already then well-established tendency of German to pile syllable on syllable in conglomerations of compound notions. Although time only allowed the completion of the New Testament, and the complete Old Testament followed later, his text has shaped the German language. Luther was a connoisseur of the vernacular, like his English contemporary Thomas Cranmer, whose speech has haunted formal English to the present day (see pp. 630-32), but Luther had a different gift. Cranmer's meticulously calculated liturgical prose presented a public, ceremonial face of the Reformation in restrained dignity, even sobriety, whereas Luther's talent was for seizing the emotion with sudden, urgent phrases. His hymns, first published in Wittenberg and Stra.s.sburg in 1524, reveal his genius perhaps even more than his Bible, because they transcend the notorious and already then well-established tendency of German to pile syllable on syllable in conglomerations of compound notions.

Singers of Luther's hymns can revel in strong words of one or two syllables, like his famous 'Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott, Ein gute Wehr und Waffen'. Almost certainly Luther also wrote its tune, which has become the universal anthem of Lutheranism. The words still provide a glimpse of how his genius seized on the fears of ordinary folk in a world full of evils and terrors, and helped his congregations roar away these terrors in song. Americans will probably know it in English translation as 'A mighty fortress is our G.o.d', but British hymn-singers will be more familiar with the vastly superior translation made by the Victorian historical writer Thomas Carlyle, who had a feel for craggy men of action like Luther, and captured far better the breezy directness of his German: A safe stronghold our G.o.d is still, A safe stronghold our G.o.d is still, A trusty s.h.i.+eld and weapon; He'll help us clear from all the ill That hath us now o'ertaken.

The ancient prince of h.e.l.l Hath risen with purpose fell; Strong mail of craft and power He weareth in this hour; On earth is not his fellow.

And were this world all devils o'er, And watching to devour us, We lay it not to heart so sore; Not they can overpower us.

And let the prince of ill Look grim as e'er he will, He harms us not a whit; For why? - his doom is writ; A word shall quickly slay him.

Inevitably in the storm now spreading throughout the continent, Erasmus was urged to confront Luther, and he needed to do so in order to refute the charge that his own delicate sarcasm at the Church's expense had sp.a.w.ned this monstrous rebel. Erasmus chose his question carefully. The choice reflected his own distaste for the Augustinian theology which meant so much to Luther: has humanity retained free will to respond to G.o.d's offer of grace? He set out his attack in September 1524: A Diatribe on Free Will A Diatribe on Free Will. Fully aware that he must play by Augustinian rules, Erasmus emphasized that the initiative in grace was with G.o.d. After that, however, he sought to avoid a dogmatic single formula on grace; for him this was Luther's chief fault. His attack was as much on Luther's way of doing theology as on the resulting theology: Luther was exposing controversial questions to public excitement when there was no need to do so. Erasmus preferred to seek consensus, put forward an opinion which seemed most probable - that process is actually the technical meaning of the word diatribe diatribe. Erasmus was a humanist pleading for people to be reasonable - and also saying bluntly that unreasonable people should not be brought into technical discussions of theology. Moreover, he believed that human beings could indeed be reasonable, because when Adam and Eve fell in the Garden of Eden, their G.o.d-given capacity to reason had not been fully corrupted, only damaged.

Luther by contrast was a prophet proclaiming an inescapable message to all fallen humanity. In his response, uncompromisingly ent.i.tled On the Slavery of the Will On the Slavery of the Will ( (De servo arbitrio, published in December 1525), Luther set out a pitiless message that human beings could expect nothing but condemnation, and had nothing to offer G.o.d to merit salvation: If we believe that Christ redeemed men by his blood, we are forced to confess that all of man was lost; otherwise, we make Christ either wholly superfluous, or else the redeemer of the least valuable part of man only; which is blasphemy, and sacrilege.16 This parting blow in his book was the very heart of the Reformation's rea.s.sertion of Augustine, proclaiming that the humanist project of reasonable reform was redundant. It was not surprising that Erasmus went on fighting, in two bulky and bitter volumes published in 1526 and 1527, in which he showed how Luther had forced him back to reaffirm his loyalty to the imperfect structures of the old Church: 'Therefore I will put up with this Church until I see a better one; and it will have to put up with me, until I become better.'17 Wearily he was confronting not only Luther, but also his own humanist sympathizers like Luther's brilliant young university colleague Philipp Melanchthon, who had likewise determined to favour Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's doctrine of the Church. Wearily he was confronting not only Luther, but also his own humanist sympathizers like Luther's brilliant young university colleague Philipp Melanchthon, who had likewise determined to favour Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's doctrine of the Church.18

THE FARMERS' WAR AND ZWINGLI.

What degree of change was Luther proclaiming, and what needed changing? Many ordinary people, especially those defending their livelihoods against new exactions by their lords and by governments, saw Luther's defiance of authority as a sign that all authority was collapsing in G.o.d's final judgement on human sin. The Last Days had arrived, and everyone had a duty to hurry along G.o.d's plan, which included overthrowing G.o.d's enemies in high places. In 1525 large areas of central Europe were convulsed by revolts against princes and Church leaders: the Bauernkrieg Bauernkrieg , often misleadingly translated into English as the 'Peasants' War', but better rendered the 'Farmers' War' to get a sense of the sort of prosperous people - not so different from Luther's family - who in their righteous anger and excitement led the crowds. The revolts were brutally crushed - and Luther, terrified by the disorder, applauded the rulers' brutality. Another text from Paul lit up for him: Romans 13.1, 'Let everyone obey the superior powers, for there is no authority except from G.o.d'. This has been described as the most important text of the Reformation. Many humanist scholars now drew back from the Reformation in fright; others committed themselves to an ordered, modulated programme of change. For many of the cowed, resentful rebels, the Reformers' message of liberation now seemed as big a sham and betrayal as the pope's old offer of salvation. Luther and his supporters would have to find some other means for pursuing their revolution than their first idealistic appeal to the good sense of all G.o.d's people. , often misleadingly translated into English as the 'Peasants' War', but better rendered the 'Farmers' War' to get a sense of the sort of prosperous people - not so different from Luther's family - who in their righteous anger and excitement led the crowds. The revolts were brutally crushed - and Luther, terrified by the disorder, applauded the rulers' brutality. Another text from Paul lit up for him: Romans 13.1, 'Let everyone obey the superior powers, for there is no authority except from G.o.d'. This has been described as the most important text of the Reformation. Many humanist scholars now drew back from the Reformation in fright; others committed themselves to an ordered, modulated programme of change. For many of the cowed, resentful rebels, the Reformers' message of liberation now seemed as big a sham and betrayal as the pope's old offer of salvation. Luther and his supporters would have to find some other means for pursuing their revolution than their first idealistic appeal to the good sense of all G.o.d's people.

What they did was to woo the 'magistrates': the term which sixteenth-century Europe used to describe all its temporal leaders outside the Church hierarchy. These magistrates were indeed the superior powers referred to in Romans 13.1, just as the Roman emperor had been when Paul was writing. The leaders of the Church, the bishops, for the most part did not defect from the old organization, particularly those who were 'prince-bishops' of the Holy Roman Empire, temporal rulers as well as heads of their dioceses. Other magistrates might well be interested in a reformation which stressed theologies of obedience and good order, and also offered the chance to put the Church's wealth to new purposes. The first prince to come over was a major coup from a rather surprising quarter: the current Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, Albrecht of Brandenburg-Ansbach, a Hohenzollern and cousin of Cardinal Albrecht of Mainz. The Teutonic Order had met increasing reverses in its long struggle with Poland-Lithuania (see pp. 516-17), and demoralized by major defeats in 1519-21, many of the Grand Master's knights had turned to evangelical religion, quitting the order. To save himself from ruin, he begged another cousin, King Sigismund I of Poland, to remodel the order's Polish territories in east Prussia into a secular fief of the Polish kingdom, with the Grand Master himself as its first hereditary duke; he did his first act of fealty to a gratified Sigismund in Cracow in April 1525. Naturally such a radical step as secularizing the territory of a religious order needed a formal act of rebellion against the old Church, and Albrecht of newly 'ducal' Prussia, who had already sounded out Luther in a face-to-face meeting in Wittenberg in late 1523, inst.i.tutionalized this during summer 1525, creating the first evangelical princely Church in Europe.19 Before Albrecht of Prussia, the initiatives in backing evangelical religious change had come from the self-confident towns and cities of the Holy Roman Empire, who enjoyed varying degrees of autonomy from emperor or princes. The first in the empire proper had been the Free City of Nuremberg, a great prize because the central legal and administrative inst.i.tutions of the empire were sited there; the Nuremberg authorities allowed evangelical preaching in 1521. But a move of even greater significance came from a wealthy city in Switzerland, whose ties to the empire had been nominal since a victory of combined Swiss armies over Habsburg forces in 1499. Amid various cantons and free jurisdictions which made up the Swiss Confederacy, Zurich became home to another variety of evangelical Reformation which had little more than an indirect debt to Luther, and whose chief reformer, Huldrych Zwingli, created a rebellion against Rome with very different priorities. Certainly at the heart of it was a proclamation of the freedom of a Christian to receive salvation by faith through grace, and although Zwingli would never acknowledge his indebtedness to Luther on this point, it has always seemed rather more than coincidence that the Swiss Reformer should stumble independently on the same notion during the same European-wide crisis.

While Luther was a university lecturer who never formally had pastoral responsibilities for any congregation, Zwingli was a parish priest who, as an army chaplain, had seen the most extreme of pastoral experiences - that traumatic episode left him with a long-term commitment to Erasmus's arguments against war (contradicted at the last, as we will see). Parish ministry mattered to him deeply. A charismatic preacher at Zurich's chief collegiate church, the Grossmunster, he won a firm basis of support in the Zurich city council, which pioneered a Reformation steered by clerical minister and magistrate in close union. In Lent 1522, he publicly defended friends who had in his presence ostentatiously eaten a large sausage, thus defying Western Church discipline which laid down strict seasons and conditions for abstinence in food. Later that year, he and his clerical a.s.sociates made an even more profound breach with half a millennium of Church authority than the inappropriate sausage by getting married. It took Martin Luther three years to follow suit.

Now not Rome but Zurich city council would decide Church law, using as their reference point the true sacred law laid down in scripture. From the early 1520s, Zwingli's Church was the city of Zurich, and the magistrates of Zurich could hold disputations to decide the nature of the Eucharist, just as they might make directions for navigation on Lake Zurich or make arrangements for sewage disposal. With their backing, Zwingli's clerical team, untrammelled by any major monastery, university theology faculty or local bishop, forged a distinctive pattern of evangelical belief with a great worldwide future. By the end of the sixteenth century, this Protestantism would be called Reformed, which crudely speaking meant all varieties of consciously non-Lutheran Protestantism. Often Reformed Protestantism has been called 'Calvinism', but the very fact that we are beginning to discuss it in relation to an earlier set of Reformers than John Calvin immediately reveals the problems inherent in that label, and suggests that it should be used sparingly.

18. The Holy Roman Empire in 1530 The term 'Calvinist' began life, like so many religious labels, as an insult, and during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it persisted more among those abusing Reformed Protestants than among the Reformed themselves. There has never been any imposed uniformity among the Reformed family. Reformed Protestantism from the beginning differed from Luther's Reformation - much to his fury - in several key respects, princ.i.p.ally its att.i.tude to images, to law and to the Eucharist. The seeds of division were actually sown even before there was much contact between Wittenberg and Zurich, since, from 1521 onwards, Luther's independently minded colleague in Wittenberg University Andreas Bodenstein of Karlstadt had already started to push the logic of what Luther had said, in regard to these same questions. As Luther immediately failed to find common ground with Karlstadt, and eventually got him expelled from Wittenberg, it was not surprising that he failed to reach agreement with the reformers of the faraway Swiss city when he found that they were making similar statements.

It was Zwingli's friend Leo Jud, pastor of St Peter's across the river from the Grossmunster, who in a sermon of 1523 pointed out quite rightly that the Bible ordered the destruction of images in no less prominent a setting than the Ten Commandments. Jud (as that nickname 'Jew' indicated) was a distinguished Hebrew scholar: he noticed the significant oddity, forgotten by most of the Western Church, that there were two contrasting ways of numbering the Commandments, and that the system to which Augustine of Hippo had long ago given his authority conveniently downplayed the command against images. So Jud was reopening the question of images which had nearly brought the Byzantine Empire to ruin in the eighth and ninth centuries (see pp. 442-53), and which had been only briefly and partially reopened by John Wyclif and the avengers of Jan Hus a century before - Wyclif had noted that same numbering anomaly in the Ten Commandments. Now Zurichers started pulling down images from churches and from the roadside. This frequently involved disorder, and disorder has never enthused Swiss society. The city council took action: in October 1523 it arranged a further disputation, leading to the first official statement of doctrine produced anywhere in the Reformation. First, images were systematically removed from churches in June 1524 and then, in April 1525, the traditional form of the Ma.s.s itself was banned in the city. Until that latter moment, astonis.h.i.+ngly, Zurich still remained in communion with its traditional ally the Pope, who had let politics blind him to the seriousness of what was happening there, and who never made any official condemnation of the man who was steering events in the city.

On the matter both of images and of the Eucharist, Luther was less inhibited than the Pope, and strongly and publicly disagreed with Zurich. Thanks to Karlstadt he had already faced image-smas.h.i.+ng in Wittenberg in 1522, when he was alarmed enough by the disorder to hurry back from the Wartburg to preach against it, standing in the pulpit pointedly dressed in a brand-new monk's habit of his Augustinian Order.20 After that bruising episode, Luther decided that the problem of sacred art was no problem at all. Once the most obviously absurd images had been removed in orderly fas.h.i.+on, destroying sacred art was actually a form of idolatry: it suggested that images had some power, and in fact they had none. What could be wrong with beautiful pictures of G.o.d's mother or of Christ hanging on the Cross? Luther used a battery of biblical arguments to offset the Ten Commandments; as early as 1520, when preparing teaching material on the Commandments, he showed his characteristic ability to play fast and loose with scripture by omitting all reference to the Commandment prohibiting images. He was certainly not going to adopt the 'Zurich' renumbering: the result, bizarrely, is that the Churches of western Europe still number the Ten Commandments differently, and the split is not between Roman Catholics and Protestants, but between on the one hand Roman Catholics and Lutherans, and on the other all the rest - including the Anglican Communion. Luther produced a formula to convey the usefulness of images: ' After that bruising episode, Luther decided that the problem of sacred art was no problem at all. Once the most obviously absurd images had been removed in orderly fas.h.i.+on, destroying sacred art was actually a form of idolatry: it suggested that images had some power, and in fact they had none. What could be wrong with beautiful pictures of G.o.d's mother or of Christ hanging on the Cross? Luther used a battery of biblical arguments to offset the Ten Commandments; as early as 1520, when preparing teaching material on the Commandments, he showed his characteristic ability to play fast and loose with scripture by omitting all reference to the Commandment prohibiting images. He was certainly not going to adopt the 'Zurich' renumbering: the result, bizarrely, is that the Churches of western Europe still number the Ten Commandments differently, and the split is not between Roman Catholics and Protestants, but between on the one hand Roman Catholics and Lutherans, and on the other all the rest - including the Anglican Communion. Luther produced a formula to convey the usefulness of images: 'zum Ansehen, zum Zeugnis, zum Gedachtnis, zum Zeichen' ('for recognition, for witness, for commemoration, for a sign'). After 1525, he rarely felt the need to enlarge on these points.21 Great principles were at stake. Zwingli did not share Luther's negative conception of law, and because he so strongly identified Church and city in Zurich, he found the image of Zurich as Israel compelling. Israel needed law; law forbade idols. Where Luther had contrasted law (bad) and Gospel (good), Zurich now contrasted law (good) and idolatry (bad). Despite being a talented and enthusiastic musician, Zwingli even banned music in church, because its ability to seduce the senses was likely to prove a form of idolatry and an obstacle to wors.h.i.+pping G.o.d. Turned into a point of principle by Zwingli's successor Heinrich Bullinger, this ban lasted until 1598, when bored and frustrated Zurich congregations rose in rebellion against their ministers and successfully demanded the satisfaction of singing hymns or psalms in their services, since by then all other Reformed Churches allowed sacred music. The printers of Zurich had in fact been happily printing hymnals for those other churches for the previous fifty years.22 Equally profound was the two men's disagreement about the Eucharist. Zwingli, a thoroughgoing humanist in his education and a deep admirer of Erasmus, emphasized the spirit against the flesh. A favourite biblical proof-text with him was Erasmus's watchword, John 6.63: 'The Spirit gives life, but the flesh is of no use' (see pp. 596-9). Luther, he thought, was being crudely literal-minded to flourish Christ's statement at the Last Supper, 'This is my body . . . this is my blood', as meaning that bread and wine in some sense became the body and blood of Christ. When Luther had jettisoned the idea of the Ma.s.s as sacrifice and the doctrine of transubstantiation, why could the obstinate Wittenberger not see that it was illogical to maintain any notion of physical presence in eucharistic bread and wine? Jesus Christ could hardly be on the communion table when Christians know that he is sitting at the right hand of G.o.d (this argument pioneered by Karlstadt may seem cra.s.s now, but it became a firm favourite with Reformed Christians). In any case, what was a sacrament? Zwingli, as a good humanist, considered the origins of the Latin word sacramentum sacramentum, and discovered that the Latin Church had borrowed it from everyday life in the Roman army, where it had meant a soldier's oath. That struck a strong chord in Switzerland, where regular swearing of oaths was the foundational to a society whose strength came from mutual interdependence and local loyalty. It also resonated with that ancient Hebrew idea which has repeatedly sounded anew for Christians: covenant.

So the sacrament of Eucharist was not a magical talisman of Christ's body. It was a community pledge, expressing the believer's faith (and after all, had not Luther said a great deal about faith?). The Eucharist could indeed be a sacrifice, but one of faith and thankfulness by a Christian to G.o.d, a way of remembering what Jesus had done for humanity on the Cross, and all the Gospel promises which followed on from it in scripture. And what was true for the Eucharist must be true for the other biblical sacrament, baptism. This was a welcome for children into the Lord's family the Church; it did not involve magical was.h.i.+ng away of sin. For Zwingli, therefore, the sacraments s.h.i.+fted in meaning from something which G.o.d did for humanity, to something which humanity did for G.o.d. Moreover, he saw sacraments as intimately linked with the shared life of a proud city. The Eucharist was the community meeting in love, baptism was the community extending a welcome. This n.o.bly coherent vision of a better Israel, faithful to G.o.d's covenant, was a reformed version of Erasmus's ideal of how the world might be changed. It was utterly different from the raw paradoxes about the human condition, the searing, painful, often contradictory insights which const.i.tuted Luther's Gospel message.

Therefore the two could never agree on the Eucharist, even when in 1529 their frustrated princely supporter Philipp, Landgrave of Hesse, brought them face to face at Marburg to heal the breach. Such was the bitterness that in 1530 Luther told his followers that they should get married and have their children baptized in Catholic churches rather than among Zwinglians, as Zwingli was far more in error than the Pope.23 This was all the more remarkable because Luther, as much as Zwingli, found that he was reliant on German princes for help in two directions: first, against ordinary people who did not want to be reformed and who needed orders from princes to move them along; second, against the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who had outlawed him after Worms, and who now wished to destroy him and his whole programme. In fact from princely support came a new label for the movement, when a group of the princes supporting Luther made a protest against the decisions of the Imperial Diet at Speyer in 1529. They were accordingly nicknamed Protestants, the first time this word had been thus used; the nickname stuck. At the next imperial Diet, at Augsburg in 1530, the party of Luther's supporters presented a statement of doctrine to Charles V, drafted by Philipp Melanchthon, which in its studied moderation was intended to win the Emperor's a.s.sent. It failed in that purpose, but the group who were increasingly being styled 'Lutheran' retained this 'Augsburg Confession' as their flags.h.i.+p statement of faith. This was all the more remarkable because Luther, as much as Zwingli, found that he was reliant on German princes for help in two directions: first, against ordinary people who did not want to be reformed and who needed orders from princes to move them along; second, against the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who had outlawed him after Worms, and who now wished to destroy him and his whole programme. In fact from princely support came a new label for the movement, when a group of the princes supporting Luther made a protest against the decisions of the Imperial Diet at Speyer in 1529. They were accordingly nicknamed Protestants, the first time this word had been thus used; the nickname stuck. At the next imperial Diet, at Augsburg in 1530, the party of Luther's supporters presented a statement of doctrine to Charles V, drafted by Philipp Melanchthon, which in its studied moderation was intended to win the Emperor's a.s.sent. It failed in that purpose, but the group who were increasingly being styled 'Lutheran' retained this 'Augsburg Confession' as their flags.h.i.+p statement of faith.

REFORMATIONS RADICAL AND MAGISTERIAL: ANABAPTISTS AND HENRY VIII.

So the period after 1525 was one in which the dark memory of the Farmers' War ended any chance of a united continent-wide popular revolution. Instead a 'magisterial' Reformation was created: these were the Protestant movements led by the magistri magistri, the theologically educated masters, and magistrates of all descriptions - kings, princes, city councils. The description 'magisterial Reformation' is worth using, and I will frequently use it in this narrative, because there were nevertheless still many radical Christians, who proposed their own versions of religious revolution, and whose radical Reformations remained very different in character and belief from magisterial Protestantism. In Switzerland, some were inspired by their realization that Zwingli was much more systematic and logical in his rejection of the past than Luther. They took up Zwingli's thinking on Eucharist and baptism. If Zwingli said that the sacraments were pledges of faith by Christian believers who had already received G.o.d's gift of saving faith, surely Christian baptism ought to be a conscious act of faith by the person baptized - 'believers' baptism'. Clearly babies could not make such an act, so baptism ought to be reserved for adults. After all, the New Testament contained not a single explicit example of infant baptism. Historically, this was correct, but the argument against infant baptism had hardly ever been made before in Christian history, and it came as an unpleasant shock to magisterial Reformers. Because the radicals sought to give a new and genuine baptism to those who had been baptized as infants, their enemies called them in cod-Greek 'rebaptizers' or Anabaptists. Clearly no proponent of believers' baptism would see what they were doing as rebaptizing; their self-image would better be expressed in the neutral term which German uses for them, Taufer Taufer (baptizers). (baptizers).

Zwingli was appalled at this logical deduction from his own theology, because it contradicted another axiom of his thought, that the Church of Zurich embraced the whole city of Zurich. To opt in to baptism as an adult was to split the wholeness of the community, into believers and non-believers. That would end the a.s.sumption which both he and Luther held as dear as the Pope, that all society should be part of the Church in Christendom. So from 1526 Zurich, embittered by the recent Farmers' War, persecuted Anabaptists to the extent of drowning four of them in the River Limmat, just at the time when the old Church began persecuting champions of the magisterial Reformation. The Anabaptists were harried out of ordinary society. Their one alliance with a magistrate, when Count Leonhard von Liechtenstein allowed them to take over the Moravian town of Nikolsburg and form an established Church professing believers' baptism, ended abruptly in 1527 on the orders of the Count's Habsburg overlords; the Habsburgs burned at the stake the would-be Zwingli of Nikolsburg, a former senior academic called Balthasar Hubmaier. Accordingly, radicals began stressing their difference from ordinary society.

When they turned to the Bible for guidance, such people noticed quite correctly that early Christians had separated themselves from the world around. The Book of Acts talked of Christians holding all goods in common (see pp. 119-20). 'Do not swear at all,' said Jesus Christ (Matthew 5.34). 'Commit no murder,' said the Ten Commandments. So radicals looked for the rare corners of Europe where they had a chance to create their own little worlds, in which goods could be held in common, where no one would force them to swear the oaths which governments and magistrates required, or take up the sword when rulers ordered them to. They took a selective view of the demand for obedience in Romans 13.1, infuriating and frightening the superior powers. Many looked back to the nearest thing that 'Anabaptists' ever had to a common confessional statement: articles drawn up in 1527 at the Swiss town of Schleitheim, which were insistent on 'separation from the Abomination'. Their princ.i.p.al author was a former Benedictine monk, Michael Sattler, and it is tempting to see the communal inst.i.tutions of radicals as a new effort to return to the early Benedictine ideal. Yet one feature was far from Benedictine: it returned radicals to a still earlier Christianity, which had suffered from official persecution. 'True believing Christians are sheep among wolves, sheep for the slaughter. They must be baptized in anguish and tribulation, persecution, suffering, and death, tried in fire, and must reach the fatherland of eternal rest not by slaying the physical but the spiritual,' wrote the young Zurich patrician Conrad Grebel to Thomas Muntzer, a year before Muntzer, a leader in the 1525 revolts, was cut down by the vengeful soldiers of princes.24 More frightening still for Christendom was that, even after the defeats of 1525, some radicals continued to believe that they needed force to usher in the Last Days. They heard Jesus say, 'I have come not to bring peace, but a sword' (Matthew 10.34), and they wanted to help G.o.d fulfil his political programme in the Book of Revelation. So in the early 1530s, groups from the Low Countries began joining with other radicals in converging on the western German city of Munster. They arrived in thousands; they took over Munster's civic Reformation, which had begun in conventionally Lutheran mode, and their charismatic leaders proclaimed the new Jerusalem. A joint force of Lutherans and Catholics besieged them. Under pressure, with the city running short of food, the radicals' revolution turned to nightmare. Their final leader, a young Dutchman, Jan Beuckelszoon ('John of Leyden'), lived as their king in insane luxury, surrounded by his harem, as his followers starved and died defending him. In the end, the besiegers breached the defences in 1535 and Munster Anabaptists were s.a.d.i.s.tically suppressed. Radicalism thereafter turned from militancy to quiet escapes from ordinary society, tolerated by some rulers who recognized that such gathered communities were actually industrious and honest-dealing. Yet Munster remained as a constant dark memory: peaceable, inoffensive Anabaptists were burned and harried because of what John of Leyden had done.25 The challenge of radicalism to Western Christianity was in fact more long term and subtle than this.26 Perhaps basic to all of it was a newly negative view of the Emperor Constantine I - 'the Great', as he had so long been called. It was a general conviction among radicals that over the previous millennium the Church had made a grave error in entering into alliance with the powerful, after a decisive wrong turn in Constantine's alliance with Christianity. Radicals noted that a very great deal of the Church's doctrine had been formulated by agreements of councils in that tainted period after Constantine's seizing of the doctrinal reins at Nicaea in 325 (see pp. 214-15), and if that was so, all such doctrine was ripe for rea.s.sessment. If one looked at the Bible with fresh eyes, where were some of the central doctrines of traditional Christianity which the Church said were there, such as the Trinity? Obstinately, many Bible readers continued to fail to find infant baptism mentioned in its pages. Some went further and came to the conviction that the Bible was not the ultimate guide to divine truth: they called it a 'paper Pope', and affirmed that G.o.d spoke to the individual as he (or even she) pleased through 'inner light'. If so, it was unlikely that there was any one normative perception of truth, un-Christian to coerce any beliefs and even undesirable that there should be one single Church. The radicals in the Reformation may posthumously claim success, for something of all these notions can now be found in Churches which are the heirs of the magisterial Reformation, and even within the Church of Rome. Perhaps basic to all of it was a newly negative view of the Emperor Constantine I - 'the Great', as he had so long been called. It was a general conviction among radicals that over the previous millennium the Church had made a grave error in entering into alliance with the powerful, after a decisive wrong turn in Constantine's alliance with Christianity. Radicals noted that a very great deal of the Church's doctrine had been formulated by agreements of councils in that tainted period after Constantine's seizing of the doctrinal reins at Nicaea in 325 (see pp. 214-15), and if that was so, all such doctrine was ripe for rea.s.sessment. If one looked at the Bible with fresh eyes, where were some of the central doctrines of traditional Christianity which the Church said were there, such as the Trinity? Obstinately, many Bible readers continued to fail to find infant baptism mentioned in its pages. Some went further and came to the conviction that the Bible was not the ultimate guide to divine truth: they called it a 'paper Pope', and affirmed that G.o.d spoke to the individual as he (or even she) pleased through 'inner light'. If so, it was unlikely that there was any one normative perception of truth, un-Christian to coerce any beliefs and even undesirable that there should be one single Church. The radicals in the Reformation may posthumously claim success, for something of all these notions can now be found in Churches which are the heirs of the magisterial Reformation, and even within the Church of Rome.

The magisterial Reformers went on battling for the minds of rulers, partly because they were appalled by hearing any selection of such beliefs. They succeeded in much of Germany and Scandinavia; they failed in Jagiellon Poland, Valois France and the Habsburg lands. Yet through much of central Europe, n.o.bility were receptive where monarchs were not, sensing the advantages of challenging the religion of their overlords. In 1525 the Estates in Upper Austria backed the Habsburg King Ferdinand's suppression of the Farmers' War, but their price for further cooperation in suppressing Anabaptists was to force him to tolerate evangelical activists and preachers in the mould of Luther. From the mid-sixteenth century, the overwhelming majority of the Lower Austrian n.o.bility, and of the inhabitants in the Habsburg capital Vienna, were avowed Lutherans, despite all Habsburg efforts to obstruct this growth, and Lutheranism quietly consolidated itself elsewhere.27 In central Europe, a defining catastrophe for traditional authority was the Ottoman victory at Mohacs in 1526, when the Holy Roman Emperor's twenty-year-old brother-in-law, King Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia, was killed, along with a large proportion of his n.o.bility, five bishops, two archbishops and sixteen thousand of his soldiers; the Turks occupied a wide sweep of the former kingdom. Quite apart from the shattering of a ruling elite, the blow to the old religion's prestige was severe; the situation was wide open for many varieties of religious reform, and individual n.o.blemen took up the cause of Reform as they pleased. In central Europe, a defining catastrophe for traditional authority was the Ottoman victory at Mohacs in 1526, when the Holy Roman Emperor's twenty-year-old brother-in-law, King Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia, was killed, along with a large proportion of his n.o.bility, five bishops, two archbishops and sixteen thousand of his soldiers; the Turks occupied a wide sweep of the former kingdom. Quite apart from the shattering of a ruling elite, the blow to the old religion's prestige was severe; the situation was wide open for many varieties of religious reform, and individual n.o.blemen took up the cause of Reform as they pleased.

The early Reformation gained a curious sort of victory in England, where the murderously opinionated monarch Henry VIII found an alliance with Reformers useful during his eccentric marital adventures. Determined to rid himself of his tiresomely loyal first wife, Catherine of Aragon, in order to secure a legitimate male heir, he found himself frustrated by the Pope's refusal to accept his contention on theological grounds that the marriage had never actually taken place. Henry demanded that it should be recognized as null so that he would be free to marry whomever he wished - by the late 1520s that meant a spirited young lady at Court, Anne Boleyn. Pope Clement VII was under pressure from Queen Catherine's nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who was rather nearer to hand than the King of England, and who in 1527 had demonstrated what that might mean when his soldiers (mostly Lutheran sympathizers) rampaged through Rome itself uncontrolled for weeks on end, bringing horror and chaos within earshot of the terrified Pope taking refuge in Castel Sant'Angelo.

Henry, increasingly convinced that the Pope was G.o.d's enemy as well as England