บทที่ บทที่ 39 · And The Religious Enthusiasm Of The Reformation

Of course you have heard of the Reformation. You think of a small but

courageous group of pilgrims who crossed the ocean to have “freedom of

religious worship.” Vaguely in the course of time (and more especially

in our Protestant countries) the Reformation has come to stand for

the idea of “liberty of thought.” Martin Luther is represented as the

leader of the vanguard of progress. But when history is something more

than a series of flattering speeches addressed to our own glorious

ancestors, when to use the words of the German historian Ranke, we try

to discover what “actually happened,” then much of the past is seen in

a very different light.

Few things in human life are either entirely good or entirely bad.

Few things are either black or white. It is the duty of the honest

chronicler to give a true account of all the good and bad sides of

every historical event. It is very difficult to do this because we all

have our personal likes and dislikes. But we ought to try and be as

fair as we can be, and must not allow our prejudices to influence us

too much.

Take my own case as an example. I grew up in the very Protestant centre

of a very Protestant country. I never saw any Catholics until I was

about twelve years old. Then I felt very uncomfortable when I met

them. I was a little bit afraid. I knew the story of the many thousand

people who had been burned and hanged and quartered by the Spanish

Inquisition when the Duke of Alba tried to cure the Dutch people of

their Lutheran and Calvinistic heresies. All that was very real to me.

It seemed to have happened only the day before. It might occur again.

There might be another Saint Bartholomew’s night, and poor little me

would be slaughtered in my nightie and my body would be thrown out of

the window, as had happened to the noble Admiral de Coligny.

Much later I went to live for a number of years in a Catholic country.

I found the people much pleasanter and much more tolerant and quite as

intelligent as my former countrymen. To my great surprise, I began to

discover that there was a Catholic side to the Reformation, quite as

much as a Protestant.

Of course the good people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,

who actually lived through the Reformation, did not see things that

way. They were always right and their enemy was always wrong. It was

a question of hang or be hanged, and both sides preferred to do the

hanging. Which was no more than human and for which they deserve no

blame.

When we look at the world as it appeared in the year 1500, an easy date

to remember, and the year in which the Emperor Charles V was born, this

is what we see. The feudal disorder of the Middle Ages has given way

before the order of a number of highly centralised kingdoms. The most

powerful of all sovereigns is the great Charles, then a baby, in a

cradle. He is the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella and of Maximilian

of Habsburg, the last of the mediæval knights, and of his wife Mary,

the daughter of Charles the Bold, the ambitious Burgundian duke who had

made successful war upon France, but had been killed by the independent

Swiss peasants. The child Charles, therefore, has fallen heir to the

greater part of the map, to all the lands of his parents, grandparents,

uncles, cousins and aunts in Germany, in Austria, in Holland, in

Belgium, in Italy, and in Spain, together with all their colonies in

Asia, Africa and America. By a strange irony of fate, he has been born

in Ghent, in that same castle of the counts of Flanders, which the

Germans used as a prison during their recent occupation of Belgium, and

although a Spanish king and a German emperor, he receives the training

of a Fleming.

As his father is dead (poisoned, so people say, but this is never

proved), and his mother has lost her mind (she is travelling through

her domains with the coffin containing the body of her departed

husband), the child is left to the strict discipline of his Aunt

Margaret. Forced to rule Germans and Italians and Spaniards and a

hundred strange races, Charles grows up a Fleming, a faithful son of

the Catholic Church, but quite averse to religious intolerance. He

is rather lazy, both as a boy and as a man. But fate condemns him to

rule the world when the world is in a turmoil of religious fervour.

Forever he is speeding from Madrid to Innsbruck and from Bruges to

Vienna. He loves peace and quiet and he is always at war. At the age

of fifty-five, we see him turn his back upon the human race in utter

disgust at so much hate and so much stupidity. Three years later he

dies, a very tired and disappointed man.

So much for Charles the Emperor. How about the Church, the second great

power in the world? The Church has changed greatly since the early

days of the Middle Ages, when it started out to conquer the heathen

and show them the advantages of a pious and righteous life. In the

first place, the Church has grown too rich. The Pope is no longer the

shepherd of a flock of humble Christians. He lives in a vast palace

and surrounds himself with artists and musicians and famous literary

men. His churches and chapels are covered with new pictures in which

the saints look more like Greek Gods than is strictly necessary. He

divides his time unevenly between affairs of state and art. The affairs

of state take ten percent of his time. The other ninety percent goes

to an active interest in Roman statues, recently discovered Greek

vases, plans for a new summer home, the rehearsal of a new play. The

Archbishops and the Cardinals follow the example of their Pope. The

Bishops try to imitate the Archbishops. The village priests, however,

have remained faithful to their duties. They keep themselves aloof from

the wicked world and the heathenish love of beauty and pleasure. They

stay away from the monasteries where the monks seem to have forgotten

their ancient vows of simplicity and poverty and live as happily as

they dare without causing too much of a public scandal.

Finally, there are the common people. They are much better off than

they have ever been before. They are more prosperous, they live in

better houses, their children go to better schools, their cities are

more beautiful than before, their firearms have made them the equal of

their old enemies, the robber-barons, who for centuries have levied

such heavy taxes upon their trade. So much for the chief actors in the

Reformation.

Now let us see what the Renaissance has done to Europe, and then you

will understand how the revival of learning and art was bound to be

followed by a revival of religious interests. The Renaissance began in

Italy. From there it spread to France. It was not quite successful in

Spain, where five hundred years of warfare with the Moors had made the

people very narrow minded and very fanatical in all religious matters.

The circle had grown wider and wider, but once the Alps had been

crossed, the Renaissance had suffered a change.

The people of northern Europe, living in a very different climate, had

an outlook upon life which contrasted strangely with that of their

southern neighbours. The Italians lived out in the open, under a sunny

sky. It was easy for them to laugh and to sing and to be happy. The

Germans, the Dutch, the English, the Swedes, spent most of their

time indoors, listening to the rain beating on the closed windows of

their comfortable little houses. They did not laugh quite so much.

They took everything more seriously. They were forever conscious of

their immortal souls and they did not like to be funny about matters

which they considered holy and sacred. The “humanistic” part of the

Renaissance, the books, the studies of ancient authors, the grammar and

the text-books, interested them greatly. But the general return to the

old pagan civilisation of Greece and Rome, which was one of the chief

results of the Renaissance in Italy, filled their hearts with horror.

But the Papacy and the College of Cardinals was almost entirely

composed of Italians and they had turned the Church into a pleasant

club where people discussed art and music and the theatre, but rarely

mentioned religion. Hence the split between the serious north and the

more civilised but easy-going and indifferent south was growing wider

and wider all the time and nobody seemed to be aware of the danger that

threatened the Church.

There were a few minor reasons which will explain why the Reformation

took place in Germany rather than in Sweden or England. The Germans

bore an ancient grudge against Rome. The endless quarrels between

Emperor and Pope had caused much mutual bitterness. In the other

European countries where the government rested in the hands of a strong

king, the ruler had often been able to protect his subjects against

the greed of the priests. In Germany, where a shadowy emperor ruled

a turbulent crowd of little princelings, the good burghers were more

directly at the mercy of their bishops and prelates. These dignitaries

were trying to collect large sums of money for the benefit of those

enormous churches which were a hobby of the Popes of the Renaissance.

The Germans felt that they were being mulcted and quite naturally they

did not like it.

And then there is the rarely mentioned fact that Germany was the home

of the printing press. In northern Europe books were cheap and the

Bible was no longer a mysterious manuscript owned and explained by

the priest. It was a household book of many families where Latin was

understood by the father and by the children. Whole families began

to read it, which was against the law of the Church. They discovered

that the priests were telling them many things which, according to the

original text of the Holy Scriptures, were somewhat different. This

caused doubt. People began to ask questions. And questions, when they

cannot be answered, often cause a great deal of trouble.

The attack began when the humanists of the North opened fire upon the

monks. In their heart of hearts they still had too much respect and

reverence for the Pope to direct their sallies against his Most Holy

Person. But the lazy, ignorant monks, living behind the sheltering

walls of their rich monasteries, offered rare sport.

The leader in this warfare, curiously enough, was a very faithful

son of the church. Gerard Gerardzoon, or Desiderius Erasmus, as he

is usually called, was a poor boy, born in Rotterdam in Holland, and

educated at the same Latin school of Deventer from which Thomas à

Kempis had graduated. He had become a priest and for a time he had

lived in a monastery. He had travelled a great deal and knew whereof

he wrote. When he began his career as a public pamphleteer (he would

have been called an editorial writer in our day) the world was greatly

amused at an anonymous series of letters which had just appeared

under the title of “Letters of Obscure Men.” In these letters, the

general stupidity and arrogance of the monks of the late Middle Ages

was exposed in a strange German-Latin doggerel which reminds one of

our modern limericks. Erasmus himself was a very learned and serious

scholar, who knew both Latin and Greek and gave us the first reliable

version of the New Testament, which he translated into Latin together

with a corrected edition of the original Greek text. But he believed

with Horace, the Roman poet, that nothing prevents us from “stating the

truth with a smile upon our lips.”

In the year 1500, while visiting Sir Thomas More in England, he took

a few weeks off and wrote a funny little book, called the “Praise of

Folly,” in which he attacked the monks and their credulous followers

with that most dangerous of all weapons, humor. The booklet was the

best seller of the sixteenth century. It was translated into almost

every language and it made people pay attention to those other books

of Erasmus in which he advocated reform of the many abuses of the

church and appealed to his fellow humanists to help him in his task of

bringing about a great rebirth of the Christian faith.

[Illustration: LUTHER TRANSLATES THE BIBLE]

But nothing came of these excellent plans. Erasmus was too reasonable

and too tolerant to please most of the enemies of the church. They were

waiting for a leader of a more robust nature.

He came, and his name was Martin Luther.

Luther was a North-German peasant with a first-class brain and

possessed of great personal courage. He was a university man, a master

of arts of the University of Erfurt; afterwards he joined a Dominican

monastery. Then he became a college professor at the theological school

of Wittenberg and began to explain the scriptures to the indifferent

ploughboys of his Saxon home. He had a lot of spare time and this he

used to study the original texts of the Old and New Testaments. Soon he

began to see the great difference which existed between the words of

Christ and those that were preached by the Popes and the Bishops.

In the year 1511, he visited Rome on official business. Alexander VI,

of the family of Borgia, who had enriched himself for the benefit

of his son and daughter, was dead. But his successor, Julius II, a

man of irreproachable personal character, was spending most of his

time fighting and building and did not impress this serious minded

German theologian with his piety. Luther returned to Wittenberg a much

disappointed man. But worse was to follow.

The gigantic church of St. Peter which Pope Julius had wished upon his

innocent successors, although only half begun, was already in need

of repair. Alexander VI had spent every penny of the Papal treasury.

Leo X, who succeeded Julius in the year 1513, was on the verge of

bankruptcy. He reverted to an old method of raising ready cash. He

began to sell “indulgences.” An indulgence was a piece of parchment

which in return for a certain sum of money, promised a sinner a

decrease of the time which he would have to spend in purgatory. It was

a perfectly correct thing according to the creed of the late Middle

Ages. Since the church had the power to forgive the sins of those who

truly repented before they died, the church also had the right to

shorten, through its intercession with the Saints, the time during

which the soul must be purified in the shadowy realms of Purgatory.

It was unfortunate that these Indulgences must be sold for money. But

they offered an easy form of revenue and besides, those who were too

poor to pay, received theirs for nothing.

Now it happened in the year 1517 that the exclusive territory for the

sale of indulgences in Saxony was given to a Dominican monk by the

name of Johan Tetzel. Brother Johan was a hustling salesman. To tell

the truth he was a little too eager. His business methods outraged the

pious people of the little duchy. And Luther, who was an honest fellow,

got so angry that he did a rash thing. On the 31st of October of the

year 1517, he went to the court church and upon the doors thereof

he posted a sheet of paper with ninety-five statements (or theses),

attacking the sale of indulgences. These statements had been written

in Latin. Luther had no intention of starting a riot. He was not a

revolutionist. He objected to the institution of the Indulgences and he

wanted his fellow professors to know what he thought about them. But

this was still a private affair of the clerical and professorial world

and there was no appeal to the prejudices of the community of laymen.

Unfortunately, at that moment when the whole world had begun to take

an interest in the religious affairs of the day, it was utterly

impossible to discuss anything, without at once creating a serious

mental disturbance. In less than two months, all Europe was discussing

the ninety-five theses of the Saxon monk. Every one must take sides.

Every obscure little theologian must print his own opinion. The papal

authorities began to be alarmed. They ordered the Wittenberg professor

to proceed to Rome and give an account of his action. Luther wisely

remembered what had happened to Huss. He stayed in Germany and he was

punished with excommunication. Luther burned the papal bull in the

presence of an admiring multitude and from that moment, peace between

himself and the Pope was no longer possible.

Without any desire on his part, Luther had become the leader of a

vast army of discontented Christians. German patriots like Ulrich

von Hutten, rushed to his defence. The students of Wittenberg and

Erfurt and Leipzig offered to defend him should the authorities try to

imprison him. The Elector of Saxony reassured the eager young men. No

harm would befall Luther as long as he stayed on Saxon ground.

All this happened in the year 1520. Charles V was twenty years old and

as the ruler of half the world, was forced to remain on pleasant terms

with the Pope. He sent out calls for a Diet or general assembly in the

good city of Worms on the Rhine and commanded Luther to be present and

give an account of his extraordinary behaviour. Luther, who now was the

national hero of the Germans, went. He refused to take back a single

word of what he had ever written or said. His conscience was controlled

only by the word of God. He would live and die for his conscience.

The Diet of Worms, after due deliberation, declared Luther an outlaw

before God and man, and forbade all Germans to give him shelter or food

or drink, or to read a single word of the books which the dastardly

heretic had written. But the great reformer was in no danger. By the

majority of the Germans of the north the edict was denounced as a most

unjust and outrageous document. For greater safety, Luther was hidden

in the Wartburg, a castle belonging to the Elector of Saxony, and there

he defied all papal authority by translating the entire Bible into the

German language, that all the people might read and know the word of

God for themselves.

By this time, the Reformation was no longer a spiritual and religious

affair. Those who hated the beauty of the modern church building

used this period of unrest to attack and destroy what they did not

like because they did not understand it. Impoverished knights tried

to make up for past losses by grabbing the territory which belonged

to the monasteries. Discontented princes made use of the absence

of the Emperor to increase their own power. The starving peasants,

following the leadership of half-crazy agitators, made the best of the

opportunity and attacked the castles of their masters and plundered and

murdered and burned with the zeal of the old Crusaders.

A veritable reign of disorder broke loose throughout the Empire. Some

princes became Protestants (as the “protesting” adherents of Luther

were called) and persecuted their Catholic subjects. Others remained

Catholic and hanged their Protestant subjects. The Diet of Speyer of

the year 1526 tried to settle this difficult question of allegiance

by ordering that “the subjects should all be of the same religious

denomination as their princes.” This turned Germany into a checkerboard

of a thousand hostile little duchies and principalities and created a

situation which prevented the normal political growth for hundreds of

years.

In February of the year 1546 Luther died and was put to rest in the

same church where twenty-nine years before he had proclaimed his

famous objections to the sale of Indulgences. In less than thirty

years, the indifferent, joking and laughing world of the Renaissance

had been transformed into the arguing, quarrelling, back-biting,

debating-society of the Reformation. The universal spiritual empire

of the Popes came to a sudden end and the whole of western Europe was

turned into a battle-field, where Protestants and Catholics killed each

other for the greater glory of certain theological doctrines which

are as incomprehensible to the present generation as the mysterious

inscriptions of the ancient Etruscans.