Fields of Blood (46 page)

In 1517
Martin Luther (1483–1546), an Augustinian friar, nailed his famous ninety-five theses on the castle church door in
Wittenberg and set in motion the process known as the
Reformation. His attack on the Church’s sale of indulgences resonated with discontented townsfolk, who were sick of clerics extorting money from gullible people on dubious pretexts.
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The ecclesiastical establishment treated Luther’s protest with lofty disdain, but young clerics took his ideas to the people in the towns, who initiated local reforms that effectively liberated their congregations from the control of Rome. The more intellectually vigorous clergy spread Luther’s ideas in their own books, which thanks to the new technology of printing, circulated with unprecedented speed, launching one of the first modern mass movements. Like other
heretics in the past, Luther had created an
antichurch.

Luther and the other great reformers—
Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531) and
John Calvin (1509–64)—were addressing a society undergoing fundamental and far-reaching change. Modernization would always be frightening: living in medias res, people are unable to see where their society is going and find its slow but radical alteration distressing. No longer feeling at home in a changing world, they found that their faith changed too. Luther himself was prey to agonizing depressions and
wrote eloquently of his inability to respond to the old rituals, which had been designed for another way of life.
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Zwingli and
Calvin both felt a sense of crippling helplessness before experiencing a profound conviction of the absolute power of God; this alone, they were convinced, could save them. In leaving the Roman Church, the reformers were making one of the earliest declarations of independence of Western modernity, and because of their aggressive stance toward the Catholic establishment, they were known as “
Protestants.” They demanded the freedom to read and interpret the
Bible as they chose—even though each of the three could be intolerant of views opposed to his
own
teaching. The reformed Christian stood alone with his Bible before his God: Protestants thus canonized the growing individualism of the modern spirit.

Luther was also the first European Christian to advocate the
separation of church and state, though his “secularist” vision was hardly irenic. God, he believed, had so retreated from the material world that it no longer had any spiritual significance. Like other rigorists before him, Luther yearned for spiritual purity and concluded that church and state should operate independently, each respecting the other’s proper sphere.
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In Luther’s political writings we see the arrival of “religion” as a discrete activity, separate from the world as a whole, which it had previously permeated. True Christians, justified by a personal act of faith in God’s saving power, belonged to the
Kingdom of God, and because the
Holy Spirit made them incapable of injustice and hatred, they were essentially free from state coercion. But Luther knew that such Christians were few in number. Most were still in thrall to sin and, together with non-Christians, belonged to the Kingdom of the World; it was essential, therefore, that these sinners be restrained by the state “in the same way as a savage wild beast is bound with chains and ropes so that it cannot bite and tear as it would normally do.” Luther understood that without a strong state, “the world would be reduced to chaos,” and that no government could realistically rule according to the gospel principles of love, forgiveness, and tolerance. To attempt this would be like “loosing the ropes and chains of the savage wild beasts and letting them bite and mangle everywhere.”
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The only way the Kingdom of the World, a realm of selfishness and violence ruled by the devil, could impose the peace, continuity, and order that made human society feasible was by the sword.

But the state had no jurisdiction over the conscience of the individual and no right, therefore, to fight heresy or lead a holy war. While it could
have nothing to do with the spiritual realm, the state
must
have unqualified and absolute authority in temporal affairs. Even if the state were cruel, tyrannical, and forbade the teaching of God’s word, Christians must not resist its power.
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For its part, the true church, the Kingdom of God, must hold aloof from the inherently corrupt and depraved policies of the Kingdom of the World, dealing only with spiritual affairs. Protestants believed that the Roman Church had failed in its true mission because it had dallied with the sinful Kingdom of the World.

Where premodern faith had emphasized the sacredness of community—the
Sangha, the ummah, and the
Body of Christ—for
Luther “
religion” was a wholly personal and private matter. Where previous sages, prophets, and reformers had felt impelled to take a stand against the systemic violence of the state, Luther’s Christian was supposed to retreat into his own interior world of righteousness and let society, quite literally, go to hell. And in his emphasis on the limited and inferior nature of earthly politics, Luther had given a potentially dangerous endorsement of unqualified state power.
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Luther’s response to the
Peasants’ War in
Germany showed that a secularized political theory would not necessarily lead to a reduction of state violence. Between March and May 1525, peasant communities in southern and central Germany had resisted the centralizing policies of the princes that deprived them of traditional rights, and by hardheaded bargaining, many villages had managed to wrest concessions from them without resorting to violence. But in
Thuringia, in central Germany, lawless peasant bands roamed the countryside, looting and burning convents, churches, and monasteries.
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In his first pamphlet on the Peasants’ War, Luther had tried to be even-handed and had castigated the “cheating” and “robbing” of the
aristocracy. But in his view the peasants had committed the unpardonable sin of mixing religion and politics. Suffering, he maintained, was their lot; they must obey the gospel, turn the other cheek, and accept the loss of their lives and property. They had had the temerity to argue that Christ had made all men free—an opinion that clearly chimed with
New Testament teachings but cut no ice with Luther. He insisted that “a worldly kingdom cannot exist without an inequality of persons, some being free, some imprisoned, some lords, some subjects.”
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Luther encouraged the princes to use every possible means to suppress the peasant agitators:

The rebels, he concluded, were in thrall to the devil, and killing them was an act of mercy, because it would rescue them from this satanic bondage.

Because this rebellion threatened the entire social structure, the state suppressed it savagely: as many as a hundred thousand peasants may have died. The crisis was an ominous sign of the instability of early modern states at a time when traditional ideas were being widely questioned. The reformers had called for reliance on scripture alone but would find that the
Bible could be a dangerous weapon if it got into the wrong hands. Once people began reading their Bibles for themselves, they soon saw glaring discrepancies between
Jesus’s teachings and current ecclesiastical and political practice. The
Anabaptists (“Re-baptizers”) were especially disruptive because their literal reading of the gospel led them to condemn such institutions as the
Holy Roman Empire, the city council, and the trade guild.
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When some Dutch Anabaptists managed to seize control of
Münster in northwestern Germany in 1534, instituting polygamy and banning private property, Catholics and Protestants—for once in firm agreement—saw this as a political threat that could easily be emulated by other towns.
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The following year, the Anabaptists of Münster were massacred by joint Catholic and Protestant forces.
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The Münster catastrophe and the Peasants’ War both affected the way other rulers dealt with religious dissidents. In western Europe, “heresy” had always been a political rather than a purely theological matter and had been suppressed violently because it threatened public order. Very few of the
elite, therefore, considered it wrong to prosecute and execute “
heretics,” who were killed not so much for what they believed as for what they did or failed to do. The Reformation, however, had introduced an entirely new emphasis on “belief.” Hitherto the Middle English
beleven
(like the Greek
pistis
and the Latin
credo
) had been a practically expressed “commitment” or “loyalty”; now it would increasingly come to mean an intellectual acceptance of a set of doctrinal opinions.
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As the
Reformation progressed, it became important to explain the differences between the new and the old religion, as well as between the different Protestant sects—hence the lists of obligatory “beliefs” in the
Thirty-Nine Articles, the
Lambeth Articles, and the
Westminster Confession.
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Catholics would do likewise in their own reformation, formulated by the
Council of Trent (1545–63), which created a catechism of propositional, standardized opinions.

The doctrinal divisions created by the Reformation became especially important in states aspiring to strong, centralized rule. Hitherto the traditional agrarian state had neither the means nor, usually, the inclination to supervise the religious lives of the lower classes. Yet those monarchs striving for
absolute rule had developed a state machinery that enabled them to supervise their subjects’ lives more closely, and increasingly confessional allegiance would become the criterion of political loyalty.
Henry VIII (r. 1509–47) and Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603) of
England both persecuted Catholics not as religious apostates but as traitors to the state. When he was Henry VIII’s chancellor,
Thomas More had passed harsh sentences on politically dangerous heretics, only to be himself executed for refusing to take the
Oath of Supremacy that made Henry head of the church in England.
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In
France the Edict of
Paris (1543) described Protestant “heretics” as “the seditious disturbers of the peace and tranquillity of our subjects and secret conspirators against the prosperity of our state, which depends chiefly on the preservation of the Catholic faith in our kingdom.”
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Although the Reformation produced fruitful forms of Christianity, it was in many ways a tragedy. It has been estimated that as many as eight thousand men and women were judicially executed as heretics in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
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Policies differed from region to region. In France judicial proceedings had given way to open warfare, massacre, and popular violence by the 1550s. The German Catholic inquisitors were never overly zealous in pursuing Protestants, but Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and his son Philip II of Spain (r. 1555–98) regarded Protestantism in the Netherlands as a political as well as a religious threat, so they were unwavering in their attempts to suppress it. In England policy changed with the faith allegiance of the monarch. Henry VIII, who upheld his Catholicism, was unswervingly hostile to
Lutherans, but regarded fidelity to the pope as a capital offense because it threatened his political supremacy. Under his son Edward VI
(r. 1547–53), the pendulum swung in favor of
Calvinism, then veered back under the Catholic
Mary Tudor (r. 1553–58), who burned some three hundred Protestants. Under Elizabeth I, England became officially Protestant again, and the main victims were Catholic missionary-priests, trained in seminaries abroad and living in England clandestinely, saying Mass and administering the sacraments to recusant Catholics.