The Triumph of Christianity (36 page)

Conclusion

D
ESPITE PERSECUTION, THE DEMAND
for reform would not die. New “heretical” groups continued to erupt: the Beghards and Beguines, the Fraticelli, the Humiliati, the Flagellants, and the Lollards. Soon came open rebellion in Prague as the queen and most of the nobility embraced Jan Hus (1372–1415) and his “Bohemian Reformation.” Although Hus was given a safe conduct to defend his views at a church council in Constance, upon his arrival he was seized and marched to the stake. Then came Luther.

Chapter Eighteen
Luther’s Reformation

F
AR TOO MANY HISTORIES OF
the Reformation suppose that Martin Luther succeeded because he stood on the moral and theological high ground. In fact, for much of the twentieth century, accounting for the Reformation was regarded mainly as a theological, not an historical, enterprise.
¹
However Luther had many predecessors, some of whom shared most of the his theological and moral positions, but that didn’t save them. As Luther himself acknowledged,
²
Jan Hus had anticipated most of his reforms, for which Hus was burned alive, which is precisely what Pope Leo X had in mind for Luther too. Luther and his Reformation survived only because he attracted sufficient political and military support to thwart the forces sent to stifle him.

In the thousands of volumes written about the Reformation, many explanations have been offered as to why and how Luther and his movement succeeded in rallying so much support. Is it possible at this late date to say anything new? Yes. It turns out that some widely held claims about where and why Luther’s Reformation succeeded are wrong; others have never been adequately tested; and some very important matters have been ignored. There were, of course, a number of somewhat independent Protestant Reformations that occurred in the sixteenth century, and I have written about each of them at length elsewhere.
³
Here I have chosen to focus on Luther’s since his was the primary episode.

Creating a “Heretic”

M
ARTIN
L
UTHER
⁴
(1483–1546)
WAS
the son of a well-to-do German family. Although his father may have been of peasant origins, he soon owned copper mines and smelters and served for many years on the council of the city of Mansfeld in Saxony. After four years in prep schools, in 1501 the young Luther enrolled in the University of Erfurt, one of the oldest and best universities in Germany. His father hoped he would become a lawyer, but after a few months in law, he transferred to theology. Luther received his bachelor’s degree in 1502 and his master’s in 1505. He then entered an Augustinian monastery and in 1507 was ordained a priest. Meanwhile, in 1505 he was appointed to the faculty at the University of Wittenberg, where he also received his doctorate in 1512. Except for several short breaks caused by his conflict with the church, Luther remained at Wittenberg for the rest of his life.

In 1510 one of the pivotal events in Luther’s life took place when he was selected as one of two German Augustinians to go to Rome to present an appeal concerning their order. Only ten years earlier, Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the Jesuits, was advised not to go to Rome for there his faith might be shaken by the city’s “stupendous depravity.”
⁵
Luther received no such helpful warning and, although impressed by the history and grandeur of Rome, he was deeply shocked by the open blasphemy and impiety of the clergy, including priests who thought it amusing to recite parodies of the liturgy while celebrating mass. This was not some anti-Catholic tale Luther later told to justify his break with Rome. Such things were reported by many other devout visitors to Rome. For example, the celebrated Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) noted from his own visit to Rome only five years prior to Luther’s that “with my own ears I heard the most loathsome blasphemies against Christ and His Apostles. Many acquaintances of mine have heard priests of the curia uttering disgusting words so loudly, even during mass, that all around them could hear.”
⁶
And just as Erasmus remained within the church, Luther had no thought of leaving even after seeing such dreadful excesses. Instead, like most other members of the Church of Piety had done through the centuries, he committed himself to reform. Even so, it was not until about seven years later that Luther did anything other than continue teaching.

It was the local sale of indulgences that finally prodded Luther to act. The basis for indulgences was the doctrine that all sins must be atoned by good works or penance before a soul can enter heaven. Since at death most people have many sins that have not been atoned, their souls must linger in purgatory—a kind of semi-hell—until they have done sufficient penance to atone for their sins. This doctrine stimulated many good works and the church assigned each of them a value as to the amount of time remitted from one’s sentence to purgatory. For example, service in a crusade brought complete remission of time in purgatory. Soon it became accepted that gifts to the church allowed individuals to gain credits from purgatory, and this practice was formalized by the sale of signed and sealed certificates (known as indulgences), some of them specifying a period of remission, others providing dispensations to commit, or for having committed, various sins. Then in 1476 Pope Sixtus IV authorized the sale of indulgences to the living that would shorten the suffering of their dead loved ones in purgatory. As a popular sales slogan put it, “The moment the money tinkles in the collecting box, a soul flies out of purgatory.”
⁷
The yield from indulgences was enormous, especially because trained, travelling “salesmen” led local sales efforts.

In 1517 Johannes Tetzel, a prominent Dominican indulgence salesman, organized a campaign in areas near Wittenberg—the proceeds to go to rebuilding St. Peter’s basilica in Rome and to repay the archbishop of Metz the huge price he had paid to buy his office. Drafts of some of Tetzel’s sermons survive and the following excerpt is typical: “Do you not hear the voices of your dead parents and other people, screaming and saying ‘Have pity on me, have pity on me.... We are suffering severe punishments and pain, from which you could rescue me with a few alms, if you would.’ ”
⁸

Luther was disgusted by the sale of indulgences. His critique of this practice became known as Luther’s
Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences,
which was a proposal to debate the issue and which he nailed to the door of the Castle Church. Contrary to myth, this was not an act of defiance—that church door was routinely used as a bulletin board by the Wittenberg faculty.
⁹
Luther nailed up his theses (written in Latin) on October 31, 1517. By December at least three different printers in three different cities had produced German translations. During the next several months translations were published in many other places including France, England, and Italy.
¹⁰
Probably because Luther’s critique became so widely known outside the Latin-reading elite, the response of the church was angry and swift. Pope Leo X soon ordered Luther to Rome, and had he gone he probably would have become just another obscure martyr to reform. Fortunately for Luther, the German Elector Frederick objected to his summons (he too was opposed to the sale of Roman indulgences in Germany), and it was agreed that Luther would instead appear before Cardinal Cajetan in Augsburg.

Arriving in Augsburg on October 7, 1518, with a safe-conduct from Frederick, Luther discovered that the cardinal had no interest in anything but a retraction of his theses. When Luther refused, he was ordered into seclusion until he was ready to conform. Soon rumors reached Luther that the cardinal was planning to violate his safe-conduct and send him to Rome in chains. Friends helped Luther to escape and go back to Wittenberg where the faculty rallied to his cause and petitioned Frederick to protect him. Of course this amounted to an irreconcilable break with the church hierarchy, and Luther responded by publishing three famous, defiant tracts, now known as the
Reformation Treatises
. A primary emphasis was on how the Roman Church was bleeding Germany: “every year more than three hundred thousand gulden find their way from Germany to Rome, quite uselessly and fruitlessly; we get nothing but scorn and contempt. And yet we wonder that princes, nobles, cities, endowments, land and people are impoverished.”
¹¹
And he wrote of Rome and the pope in colorful, violent language: “Hearest thou this, O pope, not most holy, but most sinful? O that God from heaven would soon destroy thy throne and sink it in the abyss of hell!... O Christ, my Lord, look down, let the day of thy judgment break, and destroy the devil’s nest at Rome.”
¹²

Of course, Luther did not merely issue criticisms of Rome. He proposed some radical changes in both practice and doctrine. He called for an end to the sale of indulgences, for no more masses to be said for the dead, for the elimination of all “holy days” except for Sundays, and for the whole congregation, not just the priest, to sip the communion wine. Luther also proposed that priests be allowed to marry and that no one be permitted to take binding monastic vows before the age of thirty—later he advised the dissolution of all religious orders and that there be no more vows of celibacy. As for doctrine, Luther asserted the absolute authority of Holy Scripture and that each human must discover the meaning of scripture and establish their own personal relationship with God. Most radical of all, Luther proposed that salvation is God’s gift, freely given, and is gained entirely by faith in Jesus as the redeemer. That is, salvation cannot be earned or purchased by good works. Consequently, there is no purgatory since no atonement for sins is necessary or possible. One either has faith and is saved or lacks faith and is damned. As for good works, they are the result, or fruits, of faith.

Of course, the church attempted to stifle such “heresy.” On June 15, 1520, Luther’s writings were officially condemned and copies were burned in Rome. In response, the students at Wittenberg burned official pronouncements against Luther. Despite Luther’s obvious, widespread popularity in Germany, the pope officially excommunicated him in January 1521. Next Luther was ordered to appear before the Imperial Diet meeting in Worms. Luther’s friends urged him not to go, fearing for his life. But Luther refused to be deterred—it was the most important decision of his life and changed the course of Western history. Luther’s journey to Worms was not that of an unimportant, excommunicated monk. Crowds of supporters thronged along the roads and “he was attended by a cavalcade of German knights.”
¹³
During his hearing before the Diet, Luther refused to budge, closing with his immortal “Here I stand.”

A rump session of the Diet organized by members loyal to Rome declared Luther an outlaw, but it was an empty gesture. A large number of German princes formed ranks in defense of Luther and in rebellion against the church (thus retaining the huge sums that had been extracted from their realms by Rome). Consequently, Luther could exult: “I declare, I have made a reformation which will make the pope’s ears ring and hearts burst.”
¹⁴

The remainder of this chapter will attempt to explain why Lutheranism spread rapidly and soon replaced Catholicism as the monopoly state church in many parts of northern Europe. Let me emphasize that the focus is on Luther’s Reformation. I ignore the “Peasants’ War” and other “heretical” outbursts such as the Anabaptist rebellion at Münster.

Explaining the Reformation

I
T HAS LONG BEEN
fashionable for scholars, even non-Marxists, to trace all social movements to underlying “material” trends. In the instance at hand, the idea that doctrine played a role in generating the Lutheran Reformation has long been dismissed by social scientists, and the success of Lutheranism has been traced to “real causes”—to fundamental social changes such as the demise of feudalism, the growth of a money economy, the rise of credit, the expansion of trade, industrialization, urbanization, the expansion of the bourgeoisie, the declining military significance of heavy cavalry, increased taxes, and population growth, to name only a few.
¹⁵
All of these changes were in fact taking place at this time. But they can explain nothing about the success of the Reformation because these changes were as prevalent in areas that remained Catholic as they were in those that embraced Lutheranism.
¹⁶

It is equally foolish to deny any role to doctrine in the success of Luther’s Reformation. It is hard to imagine a set of doctrines that could have presented such a profound and popular challenge to Catholic authority. Even so, most of the emphasis on doctrine is misplaced, stressing, as it does, theological intricacies that very few of those who embraced Lutheranism could possibly have understood or cared about. More serious is the fact that like the many social changes mistakenly cited above, doctrine too was a
constant,
while the success (or failure) of Lutheranism was a
variable
. That is, knowledge of Lutheran theology tells us nothing about why some places turned Lutheran and others did not. Thus, for all of their appeal, Lutheran doctrines must stand in the background.

Many Marxist historians have, of course, interpreted the Reformation as the remarkable success of a proletarian mass movement. For example, the Soviet historian M. M. Smirin (1895–1975) dismissed non-Marxist historians as “perverters of history,” and revealed that “the true, scientific history” of the Reformation is the struggle of an oppressed people.
¹⁷
Although differing as to motivations, many non-Marxist historians have agreed that Lutheranism swept across Germany on a wave of enthusiasm among the masses. But it’s not true.

The “masses”—the peasants and urban lower classes—were almost completely uninvolved in Luther’s Reformation, both as it took place and afterward. As was documented in chapter 15, intensive efforts by Luther and his peers to reach out to the masses after Lutheranism had been established were resounding failures. Luther himself bitterly acknowledged this fact.
¹⁸